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WAR AIMS AND 
PEACE IDEALS 



War Aims & Peace Ideals 

Selections in Prose &f Verse 

Illustrating the Aspirations 

of the Modern World 

Edited by 
TUCKER BROOKE, B.Litt. (Oxon.) 

Assistant Professor of English, Tale College. 
& 

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D. 

Adviser in Literary Composition; and 

Assistant Professor of English in 

the Sheffield Scientific School, 

Yale University. 




New Haven: 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

London • Humphrey Milford • Oxford University Press. 

MDCCCCXIX 



■^ 



f\ 



i^%\ 



Copyright, 1919, by 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



©CLAr>liy37 



PREFACE 

A TABLE of contents Is the best preface to such a collection 
as the editors here present, but one explanatory, and per- 
haps clarifying, statement may be added to the evidence 
there included. It is no selection from state documents 
that we have proposed to publish under the title "War 
Alms and Peace Ideals," State documents have their 
obvious historical value (and are in addition easy of access); 
but as a rule they are written to fit an occasion or to attain 
an objective, and present with complete sincerity neither 
the aims in war nor the underlying Issues at conflict of the 
peoples whose ideals they ostensibly express. When the 
reverse is true, as In the case of the Messages of President 
Wilson, the difference Is widely recognized and the value 
of the utterance, whether for politics or for literature, is 
correspondingly increased. 

In general, however, the truth about this war, and all 
v/ars, their aims and Ideals, is more likely to be found In 
the franker utterances of private individuals, especially 
when the authors have the interpretative power that be- 
longs to makers of literature. If this volume, then, has a 
distinguishing feature. It Is to be sought In the effectiveness, 
the honesty, and the truth of the highly personal writings 
here transcribed. They are for the most part neither prop- 
aganda, nor "statements for the press." They possess not 
only historical importance but also a value as criticism and 
interpretation that justifies their republication. 

Complete representation of the thought of all countries 
involved in this time of upheaval was of course impossible; 
sometimes, as with America and Great Britain, for lack of 
space, sometimes, as with Austria and the Balkan States, 
which on the whole have mutely fought and suffered, for 
lack of material. But we have chosen carefully from the 
writings of both friends and enemies those that seemed best 
to illuminate the ideals that caused or carried on the war. 



vi . PREFACE 

and will be significant In the future. Much by way of 
famous name or well-remembered passage has necessarily 
been omitted; but we have striven to make probable that, 
at least by implication or reference, all important ideas 
should find a place. The order chosen for the arrangement 
of material, with the spokesmen of Germany first and those 
of America last, roughly corresponds with the chronological 
sequence whereby these sets of ideals were translated into 
action and became important for the world. 

It is therefore primarily as a book of the literature of the 
war that we offer this volume, a literature of ideas and emo- 
tions, sometimes rising to greatness, sometimes valuable 
only for the burden of disastrous opinion, but always in- 
teresting to the student of human nature and the philosophy 
of war. Better than any reasoned explanation this collection 
presents the struggle of 1914-1918, for in quite as real a 
sense as the clash of armies or the political acts of states, 
the conflict of ideals here included is the very essence of the 
war itself. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

For valuable advice and encouragement the editors are 

indebted to Professor Frank Aydelotte of the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology and to Professor William Lyon 

Phelps of Yale. 

For permission to reprint copyrighted matter, as specif- 
ically indicated below, they are indebted to the following 

publishers and authors: — 

George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., for chapter X of "Bohemia's 
Case for Independence" by E. Benes; and an extract 
from F. Dostoevsky's "Pages from the Journal of an 
Author." 

The Atlantic Monthly Co., for Kartushkiya-Beroza by Alter 
Brody. 

George H. Doran Co., for The White Ships and the Red by 
Joyce Kilmer. 

E. P. Button & Co., for The Spires of Oxford by W. M. Letts, 
and A Cha?it of Love for E?igland by Helen Gray Cone. 

T. N. Foulis, Esq., for selections from "Zarathrustra" and 
"The Will to Power" in volumes XI and XV of "The 
Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche," edited by 
Dr. Oscar Levy. 

The Houghton Mifflin Co., for one lecture in Gilbert Mur- 
ray's "Faith, War, and Policy." 

B. W. Huebsch for an extract from Karl Liebknecht's 
"Militarism." 

Jarrolds Publishers, Ltd., for a selection from "Ger- 
many, France, Russia, and Islam" by Heinrich von 
Treltschke. 

P. J. Kenedy and Sons, for a selection from Patriotism a^id 
Endurance in Cardinal Mercier's "Pastorals, Letters, 
Allocations." 

John Lane Co., for The Last Boche and The Love of Country in 
"New Belgian Poems" by Emile Cammaerts. 



viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

J. P. Lippincott Co., and William Heinemann, for a chapter 
from "How Belgium Saved Europe" by Charles 
Sarolea. 

Longmans, Green & Co., for an extract from "Serbia in 
Light and Darkness" by Nicholas Velimirovic. 

The Macmillan Co., for Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight 
by Vachel Lindsay, Between the Lines by W. W. Gibson, 
and an extract from "The Pentecost of Calamity" by 
• Owen Wister. 

The Open Court Publishing Co., for an essay in "Above 
the Battle" by Romain Rolland. 

The Oxford University Press for part of a lecture by L. P. 
Jacks in "The International Crisis in its Ethical and 
Psychological Aspects" and for Aylmer Maude's trans- 
lation of "Patriotism and Government" by Tolstoy. 

G. P. Putnam's Sons for In Flanders Fields by John McCrae 
and for extracts from Prince Lichnowsky's Memoran- 
dum and a translation from "Treitschke: His Doc- 
trines and His Life." 

The Rolls House Publishing Co., Ltd., for chapter X of 
Bernhardi's "Britain as Germany's Vassal." 

The Texas Review for Carl Hauptmann's "The Dead Are 
Singing," translated by Mary L. Stevenson. 

T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., for Henri Bergson's lecture on "Life 
and Matter at War." 

The Yale Review for The War and the British Realms by A. F. 
Pollard, Italy's Unredeemed Children by Bruno Roselli, 
To the Russian Soldier by Leonid Andreev, Cossack or 
Republican by W. C. Abbott, and What the War did for 
Brewer by William Allen White. 

The Yale University Press for an extract from Maurice 
Barres' "The Undying Spirit of France." 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

I. GERMANY. Page 

(a) Militant Culture, 

Heinrich von Treitschke, German Claims to 

Alsace 2 

Heinrich von Treitschke, International Lazv 4 
Declaration of the Professors of the Universities 
and Technical Colleges of the German Empire 
(October 23, 1914) 6 

(b) The Doctrine of the Superman. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, War and Warriors . 6 

The Higher Man . . 8 

'' " Society and the State . 9 

(c) Pan-Germanism: World-Power or Downfall. 

General von Bernhardi, Political Readiness 
for War ii 

(d) " The Day." 

Ernst Lissauer, Song of Hate Against England 19 
CAKhHAVPTMA^^N, The Dead Are Singing . . 20 

(e) The Dissent Against Pan-Germanism. 

Karl Liebknecht, Capitalistic Militarism . 27 
Prince Lichnowsky, The Outbreak of the War 31 
II. BELGIUM. 

(a) The Belgian Sacrifice. 

Charles Sarolea, The Moral Significance of 
the Belgian Campaign 41 

(b) "The Uses of Adversity." 

Cardinal Mercier, Patriotism and Endurance 48 

(c) Exile Longings. 

Emile Cammaerts, The Last Boche . . .52 
" The Love of Country . . 53 

III. FRANCE. 

(a) "Vive la France!" 

Alphonse Daudet, The Last Class . . .55 
Maurice Barres, The Undying Spirit of France 60 



t TABLE OF CONTENTS 

(b) The Boche Peril. Page 

Henri Bergson, Life and Matter at War . 66 

(c) Civilization versus Kultur. 

RoMAiN Rolland, Pro Aris 75 

IV. THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 

(a) The Moral Issues of War. 

Sir Gilbert Murray, How Can War Ever Be 
Right? 84 

(b) " England Expects Every Man to do his 

Duty." 
W. M. Letts, The Spires of Oxford . . . 102 
W. W. Gibson, Between the Lines .... 102 
J. McCrae, In Flanders Fields .... 107 

(c) British Imperialism versus German. 

A. F. Pollard, The War and the British Realms 1 07 

(d) Ideals of Economic Reconstruction. 

h.F. Jacks, Militarism and Industrialism . . 123 
Arthur Henderson, Victory 129 

(e) "The Federation of the World." 

Winston Churchill, The Declaration of In- 
dependence and the War 133 

Viscount Grey, The League of Nations . . 138 

V. ITALY. 

(a) Democratic Aspirations. 

Giuseppe Mazzini, To the Italians . . .147 

(b) The Case Against Austria. 

Bruno Roselli, Italy's Unredeemed Children 151 

VI. RUSSIA. 

(a) Russian Character and Russian Destiny. 

F. DosTOEVSKY, Speech at the Meeting of the 
Society of Lovers of Russian Literature . .169 

(b) The Seeds of Bolshevism. 

Count ToIj&toy, Patriotism and Government . 175 

(c) The Russian Bourgeoisie. 

Alter Brody, Kartushkiya-Beroza . . .183 

(d) The Responsibilities of Revolution. 

Leonid Andreev, To the Russian Soldier . 185 

VII. SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS. 
(a) Serbian National Poetry. 

The Battle of Kossovo 189 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xi 

(b) Serbia and Macedonia. Page 

N. Velimirovic, The Home of the Serbian Soul 197 

(c) Bohemian Longings for Freedom, 

The Three Ages 200 

The Patriot's Lament 202 

The Madjaromania 203 

Hej Slovane! 203 

(d) A Czecho-Slovak Indictment of Austria- 

Hungary. 
Edouard Benes, Appeal to the Powers of the 

Entente 204 

VIIL AMERICA. 

(a) The Protest Against Prussianism. 

Joyce Kilmer, The White Ships and the Red . 20S 
OwEJ^sWiSTEK, The Pentecost of Calamity . . 210 

(b) Sympathy with England 

H.G. Cone, A Chant of Love for England . . 221 

(c) "The World Must be made Safe for De- 

mocracy." 
WooDROw Wilson, The War Message . . 222 
" " The Program of the World'' s 

Peace 231 

" " ''Force to the Utmost'' . . 238 
Vachel Lindsay, Abraham Li?icoln Walks at 
Midnight 242 

(d) Political Reconstruction. 

W. C. Abbott, Cossack or Republican? 243 

(e) Economic Reconstruction. 

William Allen White, What the War did for 
Brewer 256 



I. GERMANY 

The present situation In the world and the trend of con- 
temporary, thought are largely due to reaction against a set 
of ideas evolved In Germany during the period following 
the Franco-Prussian war. The striking contrast between 
the success of Bismarck's ruthless policy and the misery 
which Prussian Inertia brought upon Germany during the 
Napoleonic era led a series of trenchant writers to declare 
not merely that might was right, but even that a special 
moral beauty resided In the effective application of force. 
Hence the historian Treltschke (i 834-1 896) expounded with 
eloquence the idea of Militant Culture: the idea that a 
nation's physical power both offers the final vindication of 
Its peculiar code of civilization and also carries with It the 
moral duty to Impose that code upon weaker races. 

Nietzsche (i 844-1900) evolved analogous principles in 
the field of philosophy. His doctrine of the Superman re- 
iterates the superiority of the virtues of war over the vir- 
tues of peace, the superiority of the state to the individual, 
and of the ambitious leader to the law-abiding citizen. Gen- 
eral von Bernhardi approached the subject as a military 
expert, on the eve of the European War. Like his predeces- 
sors he stresses the desirability and morality of an aggres- 
sive rather than a quiescent national attitude, and he pro- 
claims the necessity of subjecting all Central Europe to 
Germany; but he also shows his realization of the difficult 
international position in which Germany's policy of aggres- 
sive egotism had left her: the alternatives are now Inevitably 
World-Power or Downfall. 

Two examples of belles lettres, by LIssauer and Carl Haupt- 
mann, both dating from the early months of the war, illus- 
trate the success with which German public opinion had 
been keyed up to enthusiasm over the great Day of ultimate 
battle. Thus was provided the second of the elements of 
German success upon which Bernhardi had insisted: "In 



2 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

the present time, when all wars are national wars, it is par- 
ticularly important that the soul of the people should be 
stirred to its depths." 

In the final section are given two notable protests against 
the gospel of militarism and aggression. Liebknecht deals 
with internal affairs and Lichnowsky with foreign policy. 



(a) MILITANT CULTURE 

HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE: GERMAN CLAIMS TO 

ALSACE 1 

It is not sufficient for us now that we should feel ourselves 
able to resist an attack from France, or even from an Euro- 
pean alliance. Our nation in arms cannot afford to send its 
sons forth at any moment into such another steeplechase 
against its greedy neighbor. Our military organization has 
no meaning without secure boundaries. The distracted world 
already foresees a whole brood of wars springing out of the 
bloody seed of this. We owe it some guarantee of permanent 
peace among the nations, and we shall only give it, so far 
as human strength can, when German guns frown from the 
fortified passes of the Vosges on the territories of the Gaulish 
race, when our armies can sweep into the plains of Cham- 
pagne in a few days' march, when the teeth of the wild 
beast are broken, and weakened France can no longer ven- 
ture to attack us. Even Wellington, the good friend of the 
Bourbons, had to allow that France was too strong for the 
peace of Europe; and the statesmen of the present day, 
whenever they have realized the altered equilibrium of the 
Powers, will feel that the strengthening of the boundaries 
of Germany contributes to the security of the peace of the 
world. We are a peaceful nation. The traditions of the 
Hohenzollerns, the constitution of our Army, the long and 
difficult work before us in the upbuilding of our united 
German State, forbid the abuse of our warlike power. We 
need a generation devoted to the works of peace to solve 
the difficult but not impossible problem of the unification 

1 An extract from an article entitled "What We Demand from France," written 
in 1870, near the close of the Franco-Prussian War. 



GERMANY 3 

of Germany, while France is driven into all the delusions 
of a policy of adventure by the false political ideas which 
are engrained in her luxurious people, by the free-lance 
spirit of her conscript soldiers, and the all but hopeless 
break-up of her domestic life. 

In view of our obligation to secure the peace of the world, 
who will venture to object that the people of Alsace and 
Lorraine do not want to belong to us? The doctrine of the 
right of all the branches of the German race to decide on 
their own destinies, the plausible solution of demagogues 
without a fatherland, shiver to pieces in presence of the 
sacred necessity of these great days. These territories are 
ours by the right of the sword, and we shall dispose of them 
in virtue of a higher right — the right of the German nation, 
which will not permit its lost children to remain strangers to 
the German Empire. We Germans, who know Germany 
and France, know better than these unfortunates themselves 
what is good for the people of Alsace, who have remained 
under the misleading influence of their French connection 
outside the sympathies of new Germany. Against their will 
we shall restore them to their true selves. We have seen with 
joyful wonder the undying power of the moral forces of 
history, manifested far too frequently in the immense 
changes of these days, to place much confidence in the value 
of a mere popular disinclination. The spirit of a nation lays 
hold, not only of the generations which live beside It, but 
of those which are before and behind It. We appeal from 
the mistaken wishes of the men who are there to-day to the 
wishes of those who were there before them. We appeal to 
all those strong German men who once stamped the seal of 
our German nature on the language and manners, the art 
and the social life, of the Upper Rhine. Before the nineteenth 
century closes the world will recognize that the spirits of 
Erwin von Steinbach, and Sebastian Brandt ^ are still alive, 
and that we were only obeying the dictates of national 
honor when we made little account of the preferences of the 
people who live in Alsace to-day. 

1 Erwin von Steinbach, architect of the Strassburg Cathedral, died at Strassburg 
in 1318. Sebastian Brandt, author of "The Ship of Fools" (published at Basel, 
1494), was born at Strassburg in 1458. 



4 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE: INTERNATIONAL LAW^ 

If a State finds that any of its existing treaties have ceased 
to express the relative strength of itself and the other treaty 
State, and if it cannot induce the latter to a friendly cancel- 
ment of the treaty, then has come the moment for the "legal 
proceedings" customary between nations, that is, for war. 
And in such circumstances war is declared in the full con- 
sciousness that the nation is doing its duty. Personal greed 
plays no part in such an act. Those who declare war then 
say to themselves, "Our treaty-obligation has failed to 
correspond with our relative strength at this moment; we 
cannot come to friendly terms; we turn to the great assize 
of the nations." The justice of a war depends wholly on the 
consciousness of its moral necessity. And since there neither 
can be nor ought to be any external coercive power con- 
trolling the great personages of a State, and since history 
must ever remain in a state of change, war is in itself jus- 
tifiable; it is an ordinance of God. No doubt, a State may 
err as to the necessity of applying this means of coercion. 
Niebuhr spoke truly, when he said that war can establish 
no right which did not previously exist. Just for this reason, 
we may look upon certain deeds of violence as expiated in 
the very act of being committed — for example, the comple- 
tion of German or of Italian unity. On the other hand, since 
not every war produces the results which it ought to produce, 
the historian must now and again withhold his judgment 
and remember that the life of a State lasts for centuries. 
The proud saying of the conquered Piedmontese, "We will 
begin again," will always have its place in the history of 
noble nations. 

War will never be swept from the earth by courts of ar- 
bitration. In questions that touch the very life of a State, 
the other members of the com.munity of States cannot pos- 
sibly be impartial. They must take sides just because they 
belong to the community of States and are drawn together or 
forced apart by the most diverse interests. If Germany were 
foolish enough to try to settle the question of Alsace-Lorraine 
by arbitration, what European Power could be impartial."* 
You could not find impartiality even in dreamland. Hence 

^ From a lecture delivered during the winter of 1891-1892. 



GERMANY S 

the fact — well known to us all — that though International 
congresses may formulate the results of a war and set them 
out in juristic language, they can never avert a threatened 
outbreak of hostilities. Other States can be impartial only 
in questions of third-rate importance. 

We have now agreed that war is just and moral, and that 
the ideal of eternal peace is both unjust and immoral, and 
impossible. A purely intellectual life, with Its enervating 
effect on the thinker, may make men think otherwise; let 
us get rid of the undignified attitude of those who call pos- 
sible what never can happen. So long as human nature, with 
its passions and its sins, remains what it Is, the sword shall 
not depart from the earth. It Is curious to see how, in the 
writings of the pacifists, unconsciously the sense of national 
honor cuts into the talk of cosmopolitanism. In the Old 
Testament the prophet Joel demanded that Israel should 
win a bloody battle over the heathen In the valley of Jehos- 
aphat; Victor Hugo clamors in like manner that the Germans 
shall first get a flogging before universal peace sets in. Again 
and again it must be repeated that war, the violent form of 
the quarrels of the nations, is the direct outcome of the 
very nature of the State. The mere fact that there are many 
States proves, of Itself, that war Is necessary. Frederick the 
Great said that the dream of universal peace Is a phantom 
which everyone Ignores so soon as it affects his own freedom 
of action. A lasting balance of power, he adds, is Incon- 
ceivable. 

Curiously enough, however, It Is just in the domain of war 
that the triumph of the human Intellect most clearly asserts 
Itself. All noble nations have felt that the physical power 
unchained in war must be regulated by laws. The result 
has been the gradual establishment, by common consent, 
of rules and customs to be observed In time of war. The 
greatest successes of the science of International law have 
been won in a field which those who are fools look upon as 
barbarous — I mean the domain of the laws of war. Really 
gross instances of the violation of military usages are rare 
in modern times. One of the finest things about International 
law Is that it Is perpetually progressing in this respect, and 
that the universalis consensus alone has so firmly planted a 
whole series of principles that they are now well established. 



6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

DECLARATION OF THE PROFESSORS OF THE UNIVER- 
SITIES AND TECHNICAL COLLEGES OF THE GERMAN 
EMPIRE (October 23, 1914.) 

We, the undersigned,^ teachers at the Universities and 
Technical Colleges of Germany, are scientific men whose 
profession is a peaceful one. But we feel indignant that the 
enemies of Germany, especially England, pretend that this 
scientific spirit is opposed to what they call Prussian Mil- 
itarism and even mean to favor us by this distinction. The 
same spirit that rules the German army pervades the whole 
German nation, for both are one and we form part of it. 
Scientific research Is cultivated in our army, and to it the 
army owes a large part of Its successes. Military service 
trains the growing generation for all peaceful occupations 
as well, scientific work included. For military training fills 
them with a sense of duty and unselfishness, endowing them 
with that feeling of self-confidence and honor by which a 
really free man subordinates himself to the whole. This 
spirit is alive not only in Prussia, but It is the same all over 
Germany. It is the same in war and In peace. At this m.oment 
our army Is fighting for the freedom of Germany and at 
the same time for all the blessings of peace and civilization. 
We firmly believe that the future of European civilization 
depends on the victory gained by German "militarism": 
I. e. by the discipline, loyalty and devotion of a united and 
free German nation. 



(b) THE DOCTRINE OF THE SUPERMAN 

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: WAR AND WARRIORS 
(ZARATHRUSTRA I. x., 1883.) 

By our best enemies we do not want to be spared, nor by 
those either whom we love from the very heart. So let me 
tell you the truth! 

My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I 
am, and was ever, your counterpart. And I am also your 
best enemy. So let me tell you the truth! 

^ The signatures, about 3500 in all, fill twenty-five printed pages and represent 
the various faculties of fifty-three institutions. 



GERMANY 7 

I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not 
great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be 
great enough not to be ashamed of them! 

And if ye cannot be saints of knowledge, then, I pray you 
be at least its warriors. They are the companions and fore- 
runners of such saintship. 

I see many soldiers; could I but see many warriors! 
"Uniform" one calleth what they wear; may it not be 
uniform what they therewith hide! 

Ye shall be those whose eyes ever seek for an enemy — for 
your enemy. And with some of you there is hatred at first 
sight. 

Your enemy shall ye seek; your war shall ye wage, and 
for the sake of your thoughts ! And if your thoughts succumb, 
your uprightness shall still shout triumph thereby! 

Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars — and the 
short peace more than the long. 

You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not 
to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your 
peace be a victory! 

One can only be silent and sit peacefully when one hath 
arrow and bow; otherwise one prateth and quarreleth. 
Let your peace be a victory! 

Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war.'' I 
say unto you : it is the good war which halloweth every cause. 

War and courage have done more great things than 
charity. Not your sympathy, but your bravery hath hitherto 
saved the victims. 

"What is good.^" ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the 
little girls say: "To be good is what is pretty, and at the 
same time touching." 

They call you heartless: but your heart is true, and I love 
the bashfulness of your goodwill. Ye are ashamed of your 
flow, and others are ashamed of their ebb. 

Ye are ugly.^ Well then, my brethren, take the sublime 
about you, the mantle of the ugly! 

And when your soul becometh great, then doth it become 
haughty, and in your sublimity there is wickedness. I know 
you. 

In wickedness the haughty man and the weakling meet. 
But they misunderstand one another. I know you. 



8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies 
to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the 
successes of your enemies are also your successes. 

Resistance — that is the distinction of a slave. Let your 
distinction be obedience. Let your commanding itself be 
obeying! 

To the good warrior soundeth "thou shalt" pleasanter 
than "I will." And all that Is dear unto you, ye shall first 
have it commanded unto you. 

Let your love to life be love to your highest hope; and let 
your highest hope be the highest thought of life! 

Your highest thought, however, ye shall have It com- 
manded unto you by me — and It Is this: man is something 
that is to be surpassed. 

So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter 
about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared! 

I spare you not, I love you from my very heart, my 
brethren In war! 

Thus spake Zarathrustra. 

NIETZSCHE: THE HIGHER MAN (ZARATHRUSTRA, IV. 

Ixxiii, 1884.) 

3. The most careful ask to-day: "How Is man to be main- 
tained.^" Zarathrustra however asketh, as the first and only 
one: "How is man to be surpassed?'^ 

The Superman, I have at heart; that Is the first and only 
thing to me — and not man: not the neighbor, not the poorest, 
not the sorriest, not the best. 

O my brethren, what I can love in man is that he is an 
over-going and a down-going. And also In you there is much 
that maketh me love and hope. 

In that ye have despised, ye higher men, that maketh me 
hope. For the great despisers are the great reverers. 

In that ye have despaired, there is much to honor. For 
ye have not learned to submit yourselves, ye have not 
learned petty policy. 

For to-day have the petty people become master: they 
all preach submission and humility and policy and diligence 
and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues. 

Whatever is of the effeminate type, whatever orig- 



GERMANY 9 

inateth from the servile type, and especially the populace- 
mishmash: — that wisheth now to be master of all human 
destiny — O disgust! Disgust! Disgust! 

That asketh and asketh and never tireth: "How is man to 
maintain himself best, longest, most pleasantly?" Thereby — 
are they the masters of to-day. 

These masters of to-day — surpass them, O my brethren — 
these petty people: they are the Superman's greatest danger! 

Surpass, ye higher men, the petty virtues, the petty 
policy, the sand-grain considerateness, the ant-hill trumpery, 
the pitiable comfortableness, the "happiness of the greatest 
number" — ! 

And rather despair than submit yourselves. And verily, 
I love you, because ye know not to-day how to live, ye 
higher men! For thus do ye live — best! 

NIETZSCHE: SOCIETY AND THE STATE ^ 

716. We take it as a principle that only individuals feel any 
responsibility. Corporations are invented to do what the 
individual has not the courage to do. For this reason all 
communities are vastly more upright and instructive, as 
regards the nature of man, than the individual who is too 
cowardly to have the courage of his own desires. 

All altruism is the prudence of the private man: societies 
are not mutually altruistic. The commandment, "Thou 
shalt love thy next-door neighbor," has never been extended 
to thy neighbor in general. Rather what Manu says is prob- 
ably truer: "We must conceive of all the States on our own 
frontier, and their allies, as being hostile, and for the same 
reason we must consider all of their neighbors as being 
friendly to us." 

The study of society is invaluable, because man In society 
is far more childlike than man individually. Society has 
never regarded virtue as anything else than as a means to 
strength, power, and order. Manu's words again are simple 
and dignified: "Virtue could hardly rely on her own strength 
alone. Really It Is only the fear of punishment that keeps 
men in their limits, and leaves every one In peaceful posses- 
sion of his own." 

* From "The Will to Power," left uncompleted at his death. 



lo WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

717. The State, or unmorality organized, is from within — 
the poHce, the penal code, status, commerce, and the family; 
and from without, the will to war, to power, to conquest and 
revenge. 

A multitude \^ill do things an individual will not, because 
of the division of responsibility, of command and execution; 
because the virtues of obedience, duty, patriotism, and local 
sentiment are all introduced; because feelings of pride, 
severity, strength, hate, and revenge — in short, all typical 
traits are upheld, and these are characteristics utterly alien 
to the herd-man. 

728. The very notion, "living organism," Implies that 
there must be growth, — that there must be a striving after 
an extension of power, and therefore a process of absorption 
of other forces. Under the drowsiness brought on by moral 
narcotics, people speak of the right of the Individual to 
defend himself; on the same principle one might speak of 
his right to attack: for both — and the latter more than the 
former — are necessities where all living organisms are con- 
cerned: aggressive and defensive egoism are not questions of 
choice or even of "free will," but they are fatalities of life 
Itself. 

In this respect it is Immaterial whether one have an In- 
dividual, a living body, or "an advancing society" in view. 
The right to punish (or society's means of defense) has 
been arrived at only through a misuse of the word "right": 
a right is acquired only by contract, — but self-defense and 
self-preservation do not stand upon the basis of a contract. 
A people ought at least, with quite as much justification, 
to be able to regard Its lust of power, either In arms, com- 
merce, trade, or colonization, as a right — the right of growth, 
perhaps. . . . When the instincts of a society ultimately 
make it give up war and renounce conquest. It is decadent: 
it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers. In the 
majority of cases. It is true, assurances of peace are merely 
stupefying draughts. 

729. The maintenance of the military State is the last 
means of adhering to the great tradition of the past; or, 
where It has been lost, to revive it. By means of it the superior 
or strong type of man Is preserved, and all Institutions and 
ideas which perpetuate enmity and order of rank in States, 



GERMANY ii 

such as national feeling, protective tariffs, etc., may on that 
account seem justified. 



(c) PAN-GERMANISM: "WORLD-POWER OR 
DOWNFALL " 

GENERAL VON BERNHARDT: POLITICAL READINESS 

FOR WAR 1 

In studying the political history of States one finds that 
the greatest successes have been obtained whenever an 
active policy, following a distinct aim, has unceasingly 
endeavored to utilize the political position of the world to 
its advantage, and has in all enterprises only calculated 
with the factor of force, disregarding every law except 
that of its own advantage. Whenever success was hoped 
for by following a vague waiting policy, or when the policy 
of the State was infiuenced by the sentimental peace dreams 
of their statesmen, the national policy was nearly always 
barren of success or led to perdition. It lies in the nature 
of things that this should be so. A firm will and energetic 
action guarantee one's moral superiority over one's oppo- 
nents and lame their resolution. Besides, the statesman 
who is given to observation and inactivity leaves the field 
free to his competitors. As he can only rarely unravel their 
plans, he cannot foil them, and he must limit himself to a 
policy of defense, although he is ignorant where and how 
he will be attacked. Thus he will always be at a disadvan- 
tage, and before long he will find himself pushed aside and 
will be treated without consideration. 

Foreign policy is a struggle of opposing interests, and 
he who abandons the initiative will soon lose every favor- 
able position and see himself surrounded by his enemies. 
France and England show the advantages enjoyed by an 
active, expansive and never-satisfied policy. France has 
founded an enormous colonial empire, and has known how 
to make all elements hostile to Germany subservient to 

^This is the tenth chapter of a book first published in Germany in 1913 with 
the title, "Our Future — a Word of Warning to the German Nation." In the English 
translation, which appeared in 1914 it was entitled "Britain as Germany's Vassal." 



12 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

her policy. Thus a nation of 40,000,000 people, defeated 
by Germany, dares to-day to prescribe limits to our ex- 
pansion. England is unceasingly occupied in strengthening 
her position throughout the world and in laying the founda- 
tions of a new Colonial Empire in case she cannot preserve 
her present possessions. She strives at the same time to 
keep down all the States which might become dangerous 
to her in the future. The domination of the world by England 
and the Ll^nited States, acting in unison, seems to be the 
ultimate aim of the grandiose world-wide and hitherto 
successful policy which has made that country the arbiter 
of the Old World. The action of these States should be a 
model to Germany, and our own past should warn us against 
the policy of drift and self-denial. We must clearly and 
distinctly follow that aim which is necessary for our future 
development, and we must strive towards our goal in un- 
ceasing political activity. 

I have shown in these pages the aims which we should 
strive for. We must now look into the means by which we 
can attain them. Let us, therefore, briefly sum up the 
leading ideas which should guide Germany's foreign policy. 

We can secure Germany^s position on the Continent of 
Europe only if we succeed in smashing the Triple Entente, 
in humiliating France, and giving her that position to 
which she is entitled, as we cannot arrive at an agreement 
for mutual co-operation with her. 

We can enlarge our political power by joining to Germany 
those middle-European States which are at present inde- 
pendent, forming a Central European Union which should 
be concluded, not merely for the purpose of defense, but 
which should have the purpose of defense and offense, for 
promoting the interests of all its members. This object 
can, in all probability, be realized only after a victorious 
war, which establishes for all time confidence in Germany's 
power, and makes it impossible for Germany's enemies to 
oppose our aims by force. 

We can enlarge our colonial possessions and acquire a 
sufficiency of colonies fit for the settlement of white men. Much 
may be done by peaceful means. At the same time, it is 
clear^ that England will undoubtedly oppose all colonial 
acquisitions of Germany which will really increase our 



GERMANY 13 

power, and that she will, with all the means at her disposal, 
endeavor to prevent us from acquiring coaling stations 
and naval bases abroad. Colonies fit for the settlement of 
white men will in any case not be obtainable without war 
with other States. 

Wherever we look, everywhere the road leading to the 
accomplishment of our purposes by peaceful means is barred. 
Everywhere we are placed before the choice either to aban- 
don our aims or to fight for the accomplishment of our 
purpose. An understanding with England would, of course, 
promote our aims and would diminish the necessity of war. 
However, such an understanding can, as has been shown, 
not be reckoned with. England's hostility to Germany is 
founded upon the political system of that country, and 
we only do harm to our most important interests if we 
strive to bring about an understanding with that country. 

Exactly as Bismarck clearly recognized in his time that 
the healthy development of Prussia and of Germany was 
possible only after a final settlement between Austria and 
Prussia, every unprejudiced man must to-day have arrived 
at the conviction that Germany's further development as 
a World-Power is possible only after a final settlement with 
England. Exactly as a cordial alliance between Germany 
and Austria was only possible after Austria's defeat in 
1866, we shall arrive at an understanding with England, 
which is desirable from every point of view, only after we 
have crossed swords with her. As long as Germany does 
not consider this necessity as a leading factor in her foreign 
policy we shall be condemned to failure in all important 
matters of foreign policy. 

Of course we need not proclaim these views to all the 
world for the benefit of our opponents. We may even 
earnestly endeavor to work for our purposes by peaceful 
means. However, we must never allow ourselves to enter 
upon a course which hampers our ultimate aim, and we 
must unceasingly keep before our eyes our true purpose. 
We must, therefore, politically and militarily, prepare 
ourselves for the struggle which is probably unavoidable. 
Then only can we hope for success. 

The first requirement of this policy is to strengthen and 
complete our armed force as quickly as possible. The second 



14 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Is to gain the confidence of the people and to do nothing 
that can diminish It, so that at the decisive moment the 
Government will find the firmest support among the people. 
Then it can meet the danger unflinchingly. In the present 
time, when all wars are national wars, it Is particularly 
important that the soul of the people should be stirred to 
Its depths. It Is further necessary to secure. In the case of 
war, the co-operation of those States the Interests of which 
coincide with our own. Lastly, we Germans must take the 
fatal decision by our own free will, and not allow our oppo- 
nents to force war upon us. Only then can foreign policy 
create a favorable situation for war. German policy must 
be ready for immediate action if it wishes to fulfil the 
needs of the time. 

If we look around among the States of Europe we see 
that France, England and Russia have allied themselves 
with the object of keeping Germany down. However, the 
objects of each of these States are at variance. Russia has 
apparently no Intention to attack us, and wishes only to 
prevent Germany's further expansion. France, on the other 
hand, desires a war of revenge. In order to regain Alsace- 
Lorraine. England wishes to destroy our fleet and to pre- 
vent us increasing our colonial possessions. These three 
Powers pursue opposing aims in many parts of the world, 
especially in the Balkan Peninsula and in Asia. Their only 
connecting link is hostility to Germany, which unites them. 
They are opposed. In the first instance, by Germany and 
Austria. Although between Germany and Austria there Is 
only a defensive alliance, they must always support one 
another. Their Interests collide nowhere. Advantages and 
dangers affect both In the same way. The two are allied 
with Italy. Italy's true interests point to the Triple Alliance, 
and she seerns Inclined to remain In it. The Powers of the 
Triple Entente have, however, not without success, en- 
deavored to entice her from her allies by the promise of 
advantages. Thus the young kingdom has been seduced 
Into following a separate policy in accord with France and 
England without considering the Interests of the Triple 
Alliance, and the consequence Is that Italy finds herself 
to-day in a very difficult position. Italy has much dim- 
inished the confidence that she would faithfully abide by 



GERMANY 15 

the treaty of alliance, and has weakened her military posi- 
tion in case of war by the conquest of Tripoli, the possession 
of which impedes her military action. In the Balkan Penin- 
sula also the Austrian and Italian interests are to a certain 
extent opposed, although lately these differences have 
been adjusted. 

Belgium and the Slavonic Balkan States are likely to 
incline towards Germany's enemies. Switzerland is honestly 
neutral, and will iight whoever attacks her. Holland is in a 
difficult position. If she fights on Germany's side she risks 
losing her colonies to England, who has looked upon them 
with envy for a long time. If she supports the Triple Entente 
her position on land Is endangered by Germany. Circum- 
stances will dictate her attitude. Sweden will probably 
maintain he'r neutrality, but her interests are opposed to 
those of Russia. Denmark's position resembles that of the 
Netherlands. She is threatened at sea by England and 
Russia, and by land and sea by Germany. Her position 
is all the more difficult as, In view of the strategical Im- 
portance of the Danish Straits, the maintenance of her 
neutrality seems Impossible. Roumania has the strongest 
interest In joining the Triple Alliance, in order to preserve 
her independence between Bulgaria and the enormous 
power of Russia. Lastly, the attitude of Turkey is of de- 
cisive importance to the combatants. 

Turkey's interests are diametrically opposed to those 
of the Slavonic Balkan States. Apart from Russia, the 
Balkan States are Turkey's principal enemy. Turkey must 
also be on her guard against England, because, although 
England does not wish Constantinople to fall into Russia's 
hands, she strives after domination in Arabia and Syria, 
in order to secure the Suez Canal against attack. Besides, 
she endeavors to undermine the religious position of the 
Sultan as the head of Mahommetanism in order to free 
her Mahommetan subjects from the Sultan's influence. 

Japan is at present bound to England through financial 
considerations. As the Japanese have concluded a temporary 
agreement with Russia, we must reckon with the fact that 
in case of a European war Japan will strive to obtain a 
footing in Northern China. 

The United States are politically independent. However, 



i6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

there are conflicting interests between them and England. 
The United States are England's most dangerous com- 
petitor in commerce, especially in Eastern Asia, and the 
United States are not willing to bear England's naval 
supremacy. Canada also is a point of friction between the 
two countries. On the other hand, no important differences 
divide Germany and the United States. Of course a peace- 
ful division of the world between England and the United 
States is thinkable. However, there are at present no in- 
dications pointing that way. On the contrary, the enormous 
increase in power which would accrue to England, should 
she defeat Germany, would be opposed to America's inter- 
ests. It follows that co-operation of the United States and 
Germany is in the interest of both States. It is also worth 
noting that much inflammable material smoulders in the 
English colonies, in India, South Africa, and Egypt. Hence 
risings and national revolts are by no means impossible 
in case England should be involved in an unfortunate or 
dangerous war. These are factors with which we have to 
calculate, and which we must utilize to our advantage. 
That is our duty. 

The interests which divide the Powers composing the 
Triple Entente enable us, no doubt, to hamper their co- 
operation, or to make it impossible. A rapprochement be- 
tween Germany and the United States would undoubtedly 
strengthen our political position. 

We must further endeavor to promote Italy's policy 
of expansion in the Mediterranean, in order to attach that 
kingdom firmly to the Triple Alliance, and to divert its 
gaze from the Balkan Peninsula. We must induce Italy 
to aim at the acquisition of Tunis. We must endeavor to 
arrive at an understanding with Holland and Denmark 
in case of war, and to maintain the best relations with 
Sweden and Switzerland. 

Germany's relations with Turkey and Roumania are of 
particular importance to us. Both States may be made a 
counterpoise against Russia. Besides, Turkey is the only 
State that is able to threaten seriously England's position 
by land, for she can strike at the Suez Canal, and thus 
cut through one of the vital nerves of the British Empire. 
Besides, the continued existence of a powerful Turkey Is 



GERMANY 17 

of the greatest importance to Germany, because in case 
of war, the route through Turkey would probably be the 
only one over which we could freely draw food and the raw 
materials required by our industry. The sea would be closed 
to us in the North by England, and in, the Mediterranean 
by England and France. Therefore we must never tolerate 
that European Turkey fall under Russian, which means 
hostile, influence. This would probably be the case if the 
Balkan States should expand to the ^gean. It follows, 
furthermore, that the military power of Turkey must re- 
main undiminished if that State is to be of any real use 
to Germany. An enfeebled Turkey would not be able to 
oppose successfully the Slavonic influences in the Balkan 
Peninsula and to keep herself free from Russian and English 
influence. 

Our position is such that we cannot regard without con- 
cern the weakening of the States friendly to Germany. The 
numerical superiority of our opponents is so great that we 
cannot tolerate such an event. It would be a very serious 
mistake in our policy to remain neutral if the position of 
our allies and friends should seriously be endangered. If 
Austria and Russia should come to blows, Germany cannot 
act as a spectator, for her ally, having to oppose superior 
forces, may be defeated. We must therefore immediately 
come to Austria's help, even if such a step should lead to a 
great European war, which, after all, is unavoidable. 

The same considerations apply to Turkey. If the Turks 
are defeated. If Roumania is made powerless before the great 
European war has broken out, the position of the Triple 
Alliance will be greatly weakened. Such weakening might 
be of decisive importance for the issue of the war, especially 
if Turkey and Roumania should join our opponents. It 
would be a dangerous illusion to believe that paper guar- 
antees will preserve Turkey in its present limit, even if such 
guarantees are signed by all the Great Powers. 

Russia would not be able to act upon such a guarantee 
if her Slavonic brethren in Turkey should be defeated, while 
an attempt on Austria's part to take away the fruits of war 
from the victorious Balkan States would Immediately lead 
to a great European war under conditions eminently un- 
favorable to Germany and Austria-Hungary, because 



i8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Austria's forces would be tied up in the Balkans. It is in the 
strongest interest of the Triple Alliance to avoid that possi- 
bility. If it should come to war in the Balkans, it would be 
in Germany's interest to fight for the preservation of Turkey. 

A policy which is ready to act is demanded in the interest 
of self-preservation and of political wisdom. It would be 
very dangerous to follow a waiting policy. That is seen from 
our own history. We need only think of the position in 1805. 
Russia and Austria were then at war with France, and en- 
deavored to obtain Prussia's support. The thoughtful were 
convinced that a war between Prussia and Napoleonic 
France was inevitable. Only the Government closed its 
eyes, remained neutral for the sake of peace, and looked on 
when Russia and Austria were defeated. It was to be fore- 
seen that isolated Prussia would in turn be attacked by the 
conqueror. Her hesitation brought about her downfall. 
Let our experience be a warning to us. 

Let us not wait again until our allies are defeated and we 
are placed before the choice either of fighting alone or of 
ingloriously giving way. Not only army and navy, but our 
foreign policy also, must be ready for immediate action*. 
Our statesmen must unceasingly labor to improve the condi- 
tions for the approaching struggle. They may co-operate 
meanwhile with other Great Powers for particular purposes, 
but they must constantly bear in mind that an understand- 
ing with the Powers of the Triple Entente can only be a 
strictly limited one. Therefore Germany's statesmen must 
be determined to take to arms as soon as our interests are 
seriously threatened.. The responsibility of bringing about a 
necessary war under favorable circumstances is much 
smaller than the responsibility of making an unfortunate 
war inevitable by following a policy of present advantage, 
or by lacking the necessary resolution. 



GERMANY ' 19 

(d) "THE DAY"i 

ERNST LISSAUER: SONG OF HATE AGAINST ENGLAND 

What care we for the Slav and Gaul? 

Stab for stab, and ball for ball, 

On Vosges and Vistula we guard our state, 

But we have only a single hate: 

In love and in hate together we go, 

We all have only a single foe. 

You know him all, you know him all. 
He lurks behind the gray sea flood. 
Full of envy, rage, craft, and gall. 
Parted by waters that are thicker than blood. 
We now will enter a judgment place, 
To swear an oath, face to face, 
An oath no wind can move, of bronze, 
An oath for our sons and children's sons: 
Receive the word, pass on the word, 
Till through all Germany it's heard: 
We will not cease from this our hate 
We all have but a single hate, 
In love and in hate together we go, 
We all have only a single foe: 
England. 

Aboard the fleet in festal dress, 
Naval officers sat at mess. 
Like a sabre cut, like a plunging sail, 
One thrust aloft his pledge of ale; 
Echoing brusque as a strong oar's play, 
He spoke three words: "To the Day!" 
What did it demonstrate .f* 
They all had but a single hate. 

' This poem, published in September, 1914, was the work of a literary man (born, 
1882) serving as a private in the loth Bavarian Regiment. It was issued by Crown 
Prince Rupprecht as a special army order to his troops and became at once ex- 
travagantly popular. The translation above was made for this volume. Another 
English version will be found in an interesting article by A. Henderson, N. Y, Nation, 
March 11, 1915. 



20 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

More would you know? 
They all had but a single foe: 
England. 

Hire thou earth's races manifold, 
Build thyself walls out of ingots of gold, 
Cover the ocean with prow upon prow: 
Shrewd were thy reckonings, but not shrewd enow. 
What care we for the Slav and Gaul.^ 
Stab for stab, and ball for ball. 
With bronze and steel we fight the fight, 
And make peace when the time is right. 
Thee we will hate with a long long hate, 
We will not cease from this our hate, 
Hate on water and hate on land. 
Hate of head and hate of hand, 
Hate of hammers and hate of bullion. 
Strangling hate of seventy million. 
In love and in hate together they go. 
They all have only a single foe: 
England. 

CARL HAUPTMANN: THE DEAD ARE SINGING (1914) * 

[A broad, lonely sweep of battlefield at night. A stretch of 
highway with trenches running from left to right and curving 
slightly at right background. In the foreground are soldiers 
lying as if dead. The plain stretches out in the distance. Above, 
a starry heaven. To the right, fires gleam along the horizon's 
edge. A shattered gun-carriage lies half tumbled into the trench. 
From out the distance a voice calls intermittently in a mon- 
otone always the same words.] 

Scene i 

The Voice. Oh — General — General — Oh — General 

{A Sister of Mercy is seen picking her way over the plain, 
step by step, swinging a lantern as if hunting for something. 
From the right come porters, carrying an empty stretcher.) 

^A translation of "Allerseelennacht" (All Souls' Night, Hallowe'en). For the 
English title here adopted and other help the editors are indebted to a very free 
rendering by Mary L. Stephenson in the Texas Review, April, 1916; but they have 
made this conform literally to the German text as published in Hauptmann's "Aus 
dem grossen Kriege" (1915). 



GERMANY 21 

A Porter. Merciful Father! It is still as death. Nothing but 
dead here. {J Doctor emerges from the background and 
springs over the trenches to the roadway.) 

The Doctor. No, there are many wounded among them 
still unconscious. 

A Porter. Thank God, Doctor, that it's such a warm 
night — Yet the stars shine like diamonds 

The Voice. Oh— General— Oh— General _ 

The Doctor. That man keeps crying the same thmg— The 
conflagration of Liege won't let him rest. 

The Voice. Oh— General— three forts are afire, General- 
three forts afire, General 

A Porter. {As they follow the Doctor towards the background 
with the stretcher.) That voice must be a very long way 
off. Everything makes itself heard to-night— even the 
uninterrupted clatter of horses' hoofs from somewhere 
or other. And over yonder sounds the tramp of marching 
columns. 

The Doctor. {As they disappear in the distance.) Even the 
very silence cries out 

Scene 2 

The Voice. Oh-h— Gene— raaal—Oh-h— Gene— raaal—— 
A Dragoon. {Who is lying near the gun-carriage suddenly 
tries to raise himself up.) Halt— Halt— you jade- 
miserable scoundrel— whelp ! You'll get a dig from 

my spur {He sinks hack again.) 

Scene 3 

A Lieutenant of the Artillery. {Lifts up his head and 
begins to stir.) Comrade— Comrade— are you still alive.? 
Comrade! There was a voice here somewhere nearby— a 

^oice . It kept calling— always the same thing— 

jade— whelp— ha, ha!— ha, ha!— always the samething 

like when your horse— you know— like a shell in the 

din of battle— out there— in the battle's roar— where 
else? Who is that groaning?— where else.? The city is 
burning — . A powder magazine is exploding — and we 
have to sleep here— have to sleep here— have to 
sleep {He lies quiet again.) 



22 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

The Voice. Oh — General — Oh — General — four forts are 
afire — General 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. {Calling out.) Four forts 

are burning, General (Starts up again.) Yes — four 

forts are afire — Comrade — Comrade — are you still alive.'* 
Wake up — so you can see it, too, — do you know the city.'* 
Have you fainted again.'' Try and support yourself on 
the spokes — so you won't fall back again 

The Dragoon. (Stirs near by.) I am already holding to the 
spokes, or whatever this is — but can't you reach me your 
hand — and help me.'' — Quick — or I shall grow giddy 
again and sink into that roaring stillness — I can't feel 
my limbs — don't know where my legs and arms are 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. — Yes — yes — that's only 
because you have slept like a rock — after this mad day — . 
, Just try — I'll raise myself way up — there — and reach 
you my hand — . You scream — . Ha, ha! — crazy jade — 
see — now I am raised way up — sitting up here on the 
edge — . Crazy jade — . Ha, ha! — I sit down here — on 
the gun-carriage — . You were still dreaming — still 
dreaming of the frenzied attack you dragoons made — 

still dreaming of that wild cavalry charge . Ha, ha! 

There, now — I am up on top at last 

The Voice. Oh — General — Oh — General. 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. If I didn't see my tattered 
uniform — I could think — (he gazes up at the heavens 
studded with stars) — that I was stretched out alone on 
the heath and that the wide starry sky tingled through 

me as through a stream — but you are so quiet . Are 

you still awake, comrade.'* 

The Dragoon. Awake.? — Awake.? — If I am still a — I don't 
know — I must be wounded — and you — you must be 
wounded, too 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. Perhaps I am — . There is 
dried blood on my shirt and my uniform is torn into 
shreds — and I feel something hard on my face, too. 

The Dragoon. If only one of us had a match! 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. All that stuff's still here. 
(He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a match-box and 
gives him.) 

The Dragoon. Smoke a cigarette—. Here's a light . 



GERMANY 23 

( The reflection from the burning match lights the faces of 
both) — Ha, ha! — Some Malchus has cut off your ear — 
and I can't move my hip . Smoking helps — com- 
rade — do you hear — see — over there — a lot of horses all 
saddled? — They've gone now — . There they are — 
neighing . {Distant thunder is heard.) 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. {Smoki^ig furiously .) Yes, 
here we sit, just like after an afternoon cup of tea — and 
smoke. 

The Dragoon. And don't know who we are — . Where are 

we really.'' That must be the battlefield . And over 

us the stars . I keep on raving — about a crazy jade — 

raving . Forward! Courage! Forward! Bringing 

death — dying myself — bringing death — dying my- 
self 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. {Slipping down from off 
the gun-carriage, unable to hold on longer.) — What's 
the matter.? — Why do you scream so.? — Why rave 
so.? — There — you frighten me. Here I am again on the 

ground . Comrade, are you still awake.? Try 

hard . Comrade, comrade, force your eyes open . 

There . The horses — they are neighing again — 

always ready to fight again . They too want to 

press on — on, on — always forward . Mount, com- 
rade, ride against the enemy . Their city is In 

full blaze . To-morrow we enter as victors . 

Wake up! He Is dead — dead! — Sister — Sister 

{The Sister of Mercy comes nearer^ searchirig with her 
lantern. Behind her, the Doctor.) 

Scene 4 

The Voice. Oh — General — Liege Is burning — General — 

Liege is burning 

The Sister. Here was someone calling for help. 

The Doctor. It is just midnight. The clock in the cathedral 

is booming her twelve strokes out across the seething 

fires. 
The Sister. The night air Is as still as a dead man's breath. 
The Doctor. Yes, but here was someone calling for 

help. 



24 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

The Sister. Everything is again quiet. Many dead are 
scattered hereabouts. 

The Doctor. That delirious one over there ^ still persis- 
tently calls across the plain into the distant night 
fires — as if his General were near. 

The Sister. Many of the dead here still live. 

The Doctor. The battle has pushed forward like a plough- 
share. No halting — not even night brings surcease to 
the marching columns which fight on, on until they 
gain the city. And those sleeping around us here still 
dream of marching on. 

Scene 5 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. {Is again awake, tries to 

raise himself tip.) Sister — lift me up — please . I 

want to sit on the gun-carriage — I have fallen — I don't 
know how — down here on the ground 

The Sister. First, take a swallow of this. 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. No, no — my comrade 
just gave me a cigarette — ^just so it doesn't fall into the 
straw here — this horribly sultry night — and like as 
not set the whole world on fire — — •. Ha, ha, ha! There 

is enough fire over there is there not, Sister.^ And 

you, you are the Doctor.'' 

The Doctor. You want a cigarette.'' Here's one. 

The Sister. But take just one swallow of this. It will re- 
vive you. 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. {Drinks, then sets it down a 

minute.) No — ^I drink like horses — gulp . Ha, ha, 

ha! Give it here — more — . {He drinks again and sets 
it down again.) Yes — ^just as horses drink — take it 

away — just like a horse . I am half dreaming all 

the time — and half awake . There is one — lying 

there who was laughing with me just now — and smoked 

with me very companionably . But he's quieted 

down — all quiet . Yes — and if I dream again I 

shall laugh and laugh — I keep dreaming that Malchus 
cut oflF one of my ears. 

The Doctor. We are going to dress your wound a little — . 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. For God's sake, no. The 



GERMANY 25 

bandage would only bother me — ^and the blood has all 
dried now — ■ — ■. And besides, I keep dreaming that we 
are constantly pushing forward — we can't be stopped — . 

Four forts are blown up . We push on again . 

For we fear God — and naught else •. Press right 

on — not stop to rest until — city by city — city by 
city •. Liege is all ablaze over there 

The Doctor. Yes, certainly. Lieutenant, — 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. Ha, ha, ha! There's 

Liege blazing away 

Another Prostrate Soldier. {Half raises himself.) To- 
morrow we take Liege. 

Another Prostrate Soldier. {Raises himself up.) The 
cities of the enemy must be laid low in dust and 

ashes . The wicked, envious creatures must be 

destroyed 

The Doctor. An uncanny night, this. This mysteri- 
ous battlefield — the dead not dead — the living not 
alive — 

The Sister. Even the dying rally, open wide their eyes, 
and cry out that victory shines along the horizon's 
edge. 

Scene 6 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. {Wakens again. They have 
made the officer comfortable.) Sister — Sister • 

The Doctor. I hope the porters will soon come. 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. {Laughing.) Nights many 
will pass over the earth. Days many will pass over the 

earth . Doctor! — {A solitary, trembling voice in the 

distance begins to sing.) "Deutschland, Deutschland, iiber 
alles— " 

The Sister. Uncanny! — this lonely voice — • 

The Doctor. It makes me tremble — ^Anguish and happi- 
ness in one — 

A Nearer Voice. {Tries also to take up the air.) "Uber alles 
inderWelt— " 

The Distant Voice. {Joins in tremblingly.) "Wenn es 

stets zu Schutz und Trutze " {The song breaks down 

again.) 



26 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

A New Weak Voice. "Briiderllch" Yes, yes — frater- 
nally — 

Another New Voice. "Briiderlich" — Of course — frater- 
nally! 

{It grows deathly still again. A powder magazine ex^ 
plodes in the distance with a thundering din, and the 
night becomes suddenly illumined. More prostrate sol- 
diers are seen to rouse themselves here and there across 
the broad night-field.) 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. Ha, ha, ha, ha — there — 
there — it is no vision — no, no — it really is no vision — - 
the whole wide plain begins to glow like a graveyard 
on Hallowe'en night — the dead soldiers arise like vault- 
ing flames — • 
{He too is suddenly seized with the desire to sing.) 

"Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze 
Briiderlich zusammenhalt — " 

{Now more and more shadowy forms are silhouetted 
against the light in the rear, some standing, some bent 
over, others half prostrate or with only the head wearily 
held up; and their voices mingle together from all parts of 
the stage.) 

"Von der Maas bis an die Memel, 
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt — " 

{The voices of the whole battlefield at last seem to swell 
into the mighty chorus.) 

"Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles, 
tjber alles in der Welt." 

{The shadows sink gently into one another, and the song 
ebbs slowly away.) 

Scene 7 

{Porters have meantime arrived, and the Lieutenant of 

Artillery is placed upon a stretcher.) 
The Lieutenant of Artillery. Nights many will pass 

over the earth — Do you believe it. Doctor.? 
The Doctor. {Soothingly.) Certainly, many nights will 

yet pass over the earth — 



GERMANY 27 

The Lieutenant of Artillery. Many, many days too 
will pass over the earth — even to-day a new morning 
will awaken, the sun will again blaze on the horizon, — 
Ah well — to be sure — {Mysteriously and weightily) 
'Tis only once in a while that the blood-drenched night 
earth reeks like bottom lands in freshet time. . . . 
{The Lieutenant of Artillery^ accompanied by the Doctor, 
is carried off. Meantime the Sister bends over another 
of the wounded. A single, trembling voice strikes up in 
the distance and sings all alone.) 

"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit 
Fiir das deutsche Vaterland — 
Dafiir lasst uns leben, sterben, 
Briiderlich mit Herz und Hand — 

{During the song the curtain falls.) 



(e) THE DISSENT AGAINST PAN-GERMANISM 

KARL LIEBKNECHT: CAPITALISTIC MILITARISM 

(1906) 1 

the proletariat and war 

If the function of militarism was above defined as being a 
national one directed against the foreign enemy it must not 
be understood to mean that it is a function answering the 
interests, welfare and wishes of the capitalistically governed 
and exploited peoples. The proletariat of the whole world 
cannot expect any profit from the policies which make nec- 
essary the "militarism for abroad"; its interests are most 
sharply opposed to such policies. Directly or indirectly those 
policies serve the exploiting interests of the ruling classes of 
capitalism. They are policies which prepare, more or less 
skilfully, the way for the world-wide expansion of the wildly 
anarchical mode of production and the senseless and mur- 
derous competition of capitalism, in which process all the 
duties of civilized man towards the less developed peoples 
are flung aside; and yet nothing is really attained except an 

^ Karl Liebknecht, leader of the German radical socialists, was born in 1871, and 
was killed during the "Spartacus" riots in Berlin, January 15, 1919. 



28 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

insane imperiling of the whole existence of our civilization 
in consequence of the warlike world complications that are 
conjured up. The working-class, too, welcome the immense 
economic developments of our days. But they also know 
that this economic development could be carried on peace- 
fully without the mailed fist, without militarism and naval- 
ism, without the trident being in our hand and without the 
barbarities of our colonial system, if only sensibly managed 
communities were to carry it on according to international 
understandings and in conformity with the duties and in- 
terests of civilization. They know that our world policy 
largely explains itself as an attempt to fight down and con- 
fuse forcibly and clumsily the social and political home 
problems confronting the ruling classes, in short, as an 
attempt at a policy of deceptions and misleadings such as 
Napoleon III. was a master of. They know that the enemies 
of the working-class love to make their pots boil over the 
fires of narrow-minded jingoism; that the fear of war in 1887, 
unscrupulously engineered by Bismarck, did excellent service 
to the most dangerous forces of reaction; that according to a 
nice little plan, lately revealed, and hatched by a number 
of highly placed personages, the Reichstag suffrage was to be 
filched from the German people in the excitement of jin- 
goism, "after the return of a victorious army." They know 
that the advantages of the economic development which 
those policies attempt to exploit, especially all the advan- 
tages of our colonial policies, flow into the ample pockets of 
the exploiting class, of capitalism, the arch-enemy of the 
proletariat. They know that the wars the ruling classes en- 
gage in for their own purposes demand of the working-class 
the most terrible sacrifice of blood and treasure, for which 
they are recompensed, after the work has been done, by 
miserable pensions, beggarly grants to war invalids, street 
organs and kicks. They know that after every war a veritable 
mud-volcano of Hunnic brutality and baseness sends its 
floods over the nations participating in it, rebarbarizing all 
civilization for years. The worker knows that the fatherland 
for which he is to fight is not his fatherland; that there is 
only one real enemy for the proletariat of every country — 
the capitalist class who oppresses and exploits the proletariat; 
that the proletariat of every country is by its most vital 



GERMANY 29 

interests closely bound to the proletariat of every other 
country; that all national Interests recede before the com- 
mon interests of the international proletariat; and that the 
international coalition of exploiters and oppressors must be 
opposed by the international coalition of the exploited and 
oppressed. He knows that the proletarians, if they were to 
be employed In a war, would be led to fight against their 
own brethren and the members of their own class, and thus 
against their own Interests. The class-conscious proletarian 
therefore not only frowns upon that International purpose 
of the army and the entire capitalist policy of expansion, 
he Is fighting them earnestly and with understanding. To 
the proletariat falls the chief task of fighting militarism in 
that direction, too, to the utmost, and It is more and more 
becoming conscious of that task, which Is shown by the 
International congresses; by the exchange of protestations 
of solidarity between the German and French Socialists at 
the outbreak of the Franco-German War of 1870, between 
the Spanish and American Socialists at the outbreak of the 
war about Cuba, between the Russian and Japanese Social- 
ists at the outbreak of the war In eastern Asia In 1904; and 
by the resolution to declare a general strike In case of war 
between Sweden and Norway, adopted by the Swedish 
Social Democrats. It was further shown by the parliamentary 
attitude of the German Social Democracy towards the war 
credits of 1870 and during the Morocco conflict, as also by 
the attitude taken up by the class-conscious proletariat 
towards intervention in Russia. 



FUNDAMENTAL FEATURES OF MILITARISM FOR HOME 

AND ITS PURPOSE 

Militarism does not only serve for defense and attack 
against the foreign enemy; It has a second task, one which 
Is being brought out ever more clearly with the growing 
accentuation of class antagonism, defining ever more clearly 
the form and nature of militarism, viz., that of protecting 
the existing state of society, that of being a pillar of capital- 
ism and all reactionary forces in the war of liberation en- 
gaged in by the working-class. Here it shows itself purely 
as a weapon in the class struggle, a weapon In the hands of 



30 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

the ruling classes, serving, in conjunction with the police 
and law-courts, school and church, the purpose of obstruct- 
ing the development of class-consciousness and of securing, 
besides, at all costs to a minority the dominating position 
in the state and the liberty of exploiting their fellow-men, 
even against the enlightened will of the majority of the 
people. 

This Is modern militarism, which attempts nothing less 
than squaring the circle, which arms the people against the 
people Itself; which, by trying with all means to force upon 
social division an artificial division according to ages, makes 
bold to turn the workman into an oppressor and an enemy, 
into a murderer of members of his own class and his friends, 
of his parents, sisters and brothers and children, into a mur- 
derer of his own past and future; which pretends to be 
democratic and despotic, enlightened and mechanical, pop- 
ular and anti-popular at the same time. 

It must, however, not be forgotten that militarism can 
also turn the point of Its sword against the interior national, 
and even the interior religious "enemy" (in Germany, for 
instance, against the Poles, Alsatians and Danes), and can 
moreover be employed in conflicts among the non-proletarian 
classes; that militarism is a highly polymorphous phenom- 
enon, capable of many changes; and that the Prusso- 
German militarism has attained a peculiarly flourishing 
state in consequence of the peculiar semi-absolutist, feudal- 
bureaucratic conditions of Germany. This Prusso-German 
militarism is endowed with all the bad and dangerous qual- 
ities of any form of capitalist militarism, so that it is best 
suited to serve as a paradigm for showing militarism in its 
present stage, in its forms, means and eff"ects. As nobody has 
as yet succeeded, to use a Bismarcklan phrase, in imitating 
our Prussian lieutenants, nobody has as yet been fully able 
to imitate our Prusso-German militarism, which has not 
only become a state within the state, but positively a state 
above the state. 



GERMANY 31 

PRINCE KARL LICHNOWSKY: THE OUTBREAK OF THE 

WAR (1916)1 

The rage of certain gentlemen over my success in London 
and the position I had achieved was indescribable. Schemes 
were set on foot to impede my carrying out my duties. I was 
left in complete ignorance of most important things, and I 
had to confine myself to sending in unimportant and dull 
reports. Secret reports from agents about things of which 
I could know nothing without spies and necessary funds 
were never available for me, and it was only in the last days 
of July, 1914, that I heard accidentally from the Naval 
Attache of the secret Anglo-French agreement for joint ac- 
tion of the two fleets in case of war. 

After my arrival I became convinced that in no circum- 
stances need we fear a British attack or British support of a 
foreign attack, but that under all conditions England would 
protect France. I advanced this opinion in repeated reports 
with detailed reasoning and insistence, but without gaining 
credence, although Lord Haldane's refusal of the formula of 
neutrality and England's attitude during the Morocco 
crisis were clear indications. In addition, the above-men- 
tioned secret agreements were known to the department. 

I repeatedly urged that England as a commercial State 
would suffer greatly in any war between the European great 
powers, and would therefore prevent such a war by all 
available means, but, on the other hand, in the interest of 
the European balance of power and to prevent Germany's 
Dverlordship, would never tolerate the weakening or de- 
struction of France. Lord Haldane told me this shortly 
after my arrival. All influential people spoke in the same 
way. 

I then received instructions that I was to induce the Eng- 
lish press to take up a friendly attitude if Austria gave the 
■'death blow" to the great Serbian movement, and so far as 
possible I was by my influence to prevent public opinion 
from opposing Austria. Recollections of the attitude of 
England during the annexation crisis, when public opinion 

^ The conclusion of the autobiographical account of the German ambassador to 
England in 1914. Written for private circulation, in 1916, this "memorandum" 
iccidentally got into print, caused a great sensation, and cost the author his seat 
,n the Prussian House of Lords. 



32 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

showed sympathy for the Serbian rights in Bosnia, recollec- 
tions also of the benevolent promotion of national move- 
ments in the time of Lord Byron and Garibaldi — these and 
other things spoke so strongly against the probability of 
support being given to the projected punitive expedition 
against the murderers that I considered it necessary to give 
an urgent warning. But I also gave a warning against the 
whole project, which I described as adventurous and danger- 
ous, and I advised that moderation should be recommended 
to the Austrians, because I did not believe in the localization 
of the conflict. 

Herr von Jagow answered me that Russia was not ready; 
there would doubtless be a certain amount of bluster, but 
the more firmly we stood by Austria the more would Russia 
draw back. He said that Austria was already accusing us of 
want of spirit, and that we should not squeeze her. On the 
other hand, feeling in Russia was becoming ever more anti- 
German, and so we must simply risk it. 

This attitude, as I learned later, was based upon reports 
from Count Pourtales [German Ambassador in Petrograd] 
to the effect that Russia would not move in any circum- 
stances; these reports caused us to stimulate Count Berch- 
told to the greatest possible energy. Consequently I hoped 
for salvation from an English mediation, because I knew 
Sir Edward Grey's influence in Petrograd could be turned 
to use in favor of peace. So I used my friendly relations with 
Sir Edward Grey, and in confidence begged him to advise 
moderation in Russia, if Austria, as it seemed, demanded 
satisfaction from the Serbs. 

At first the attitude of the English press was calm and 
friendly to the Austrians, because the murder was con- 
demned. But gradually more and more voices were heard 
to insist that, however necessary the punishment of the 
crime, an exploitation of the crime for political purposes 
could not be justified. Austria was strongly urged to show 
moderation. 

When the ultimatum appeared all the newspapers, with 
the exception of The Standard^ which was always in low 
water and apparently was paid by the Austrians, were at 
one in their condemnation. The whole world, except In 
Berlin and Vienna, understood that it meant war, and indeed 



GERMANY 33 

world-war. The British fleet, which chanced to be assembled 
for a review, was not demobilized. 

At first I pressed for as conciliatory an answer as possible 
on the part of Serbia, since the attitude of the Russian 
Government left no further doubt of the seriousness of the 
situation. 

The Serbian reply was in accordance with British efforts; 
M. Pashitch had actually accepted everything, except two 
points, about which he declared his readiness to negotiate. 
If Russia and England had wanted war, in order to fall 
upon us, a hint to Belgrade would have been sufficient, and 
the unheard-of [Austrian] note would have remained un- 
answered. 

Sir Edward Grey went through the Serbian reply with 
me, and pointed to the conciliatory attitude of the Govern- 
ment at Belgrade. We then discussed his mediation pro- 
posal, which was to arrange an interpretation of the two 
points acceptable to both parties. M. Cambon [French 
Ambassador in London], the Marquis Imperiali [Italian 
Ambassador in London], and I should have met under Sir 
Edward Grey's presidency, and it would have been easy 
to find an acceptable form for the disputed points, which 
in the main concerned the participation of Austrian officials 
in the investigation at Belgrade. Given good-will, everything 
could have been settled in one or two sittings, and the mere 
acceptance of the British proposal would have relieved the 
tension and would have further improved our relations to 
England. I urgently recommended the proposal, saying that 
otherwise world-war was imminent, in which we had every- 
thing to lose and nothing to gain. In vain! I was told that 
it was against the dignity of Austria, and that we did not 
want to interfere in the Serbian business, but left it to our 
ally. I was told to work for "localization of the conflict." 

Of course it would only have needed a hint from Berlin 
to make Count Berchtold satisfy himself with a diplomatic 
success and put up with the Serbian reply. But this hint was 
not given. On the contrary, we pressed for war. What a fine 
success it would have been. 

After our refusal Sir Edward asked us to come forward 
with a proposal of our own. We insisted upon war. I could 
get no other answer [from Berlin] than that it was an enor- 



34 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

mous "concession" on the part of Austria to contemplate 
no annexation of territory. 

Thereupon Sir Edward justly pointed out that even with- 
out annexations of territory a country can be humiliated and 
subjected, and that Russia would regard this as a humilia- 
tion which she would not stand. 

The impression became ever stronger that we desired war 
in all circumstances. Otherwise our attitude in a question 
which, after all, did not directly concern us was unintelligi- 
ble. The urgent appeals and definite declarations of M. 
Sazonoff [Russian Foreign Minister], later on the positively 
humble telegrams of the Czar, the repeated proposals of 
Sir Edward, the warnings of San Giuliano [Italian Foreign 
Minister], and of BollatI [Italian Ambassador In Berlin], 
my urgent advice — it was all of no use, for Berlin went on 
insisting that Serbia must be massacred. 

The more I pressed, the less willing they were to alter 
their course, if only because I was not to have the success 
of saving peace In the company of Sir Edward Grey. 

So Grey on July 29th resolved upon his well-known 
warning. I replied that I had always reported that we should 
have to reckon upon English hostility If it came to war with 
France. The Minister said to me repeatedly: "If war breaks 
out it will be the greatest catastrophe the world has ever 
seen." 

After that events moved rapidly. When Count Berchtold, 
who hitherto had played the strong man on Instructions 
from Berlin, at last decided to change his course, we answered 
the Russian mobilization — after Russia had for a whole 
week negotiated and waited In vain — with our ultimatum 
and declaration of war. 

Sir Edward Grey still looked for new ways of escape. In 
the morning of August ist, Sir W. Tyrrell came to me to say 
that his chief still hoped to find a way out. Should we remain 
neutral if France did the same.f" I understood him to mean 
that we should then be ready to spare France, but his mean- 
ing was that we should remain absolutely neutral — neutral 
therefore even toward Russia. That was the well-known 
misunderstanding. Sir Edward had given me an appoint- 
ment for the afternoon, but as he was then at a meeting of 
the Cabinet, he called me up on the telephone, after Sir W. 



GERMANY 



35 



Tyrrell had hurried straight to him. But in the afternoon he 
spoke no longer of anything but Belgian neutrality, and of 
the possibility that we and France should face one another 
armed, without attacking one another. 

Thus there was no proposal whatever, but a question 
without any obligation, because our conversation, as I have 
already explained, was to take place soon afterward. In 
Berlin, however — without waiting for the conversation — 
this news was used as the foundation for a far-reaching act. 
Then came Poincare's letter, Bonar Law's letter, and the 
telegram from the King of the Belgians. The hesitating 
members of the Cabinet were converted, with the exception 
of three members, who resigned. 

Up to the last moment I had hoped for a waiting attitude 
on the part of England. My French colleague also felt him- 
self by no means secure, as I learned from a private source. 
As late as August 1st the King replied evasively to the 
French President. But in the telegram from Berlin which 
announced the threatening danger of war, England was 
already mentioned as an opponent. In Berlin, therefore, one 
already reckoned upon war with England. 

Before my departure Sir Edward Grey received me on 
August 5th at his house. I had gone there at his desire. He 
was deeply moved. He said to me that he would always be 
ready to mediate, and, "We don't want to crush Germany." 
Unfortunately this confidential conversation was pub- 
lished. Thereby Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg destroyed 
the last possibility of reaching peace via England. 

Our departure was thoroughly dignified and calm. Before 
we left, the King had sent his equerry. Sir E. Ponsonby, to 
me, to express his regret at my departure and that he could 
not see me personally. Princess Louise wrote to me that the 
whole family lamented our going. Mrs. Asquith and other 
friends came to the embassy to say good-bye. 

A special train took us to Harwich, where a guard of 
honor was drawn up for me. I was treated like a departing 
sovereign. Thus ended my London mission. It was wrecked 
not by the perfidy of the British, but by the perfidy of our 
policy. 

At the railway station in London Count Mensdorff' [Aus- 
trian Ambassador] appeared with his staff. He was cheerful, 



36 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

and gave me to understand that perhaps he would remain in 
London. But to the English he said that it was not Austria, 
but we, who had wanted the war. 

When now, after two years, I realize everything in ret- 
rospect, I say to myself that I realized too late that there 
was no place for me in a system which for years had lived 
only on tradition and routine, and which tolerates only 
representatives who report what one wants to read. Ab- 
sence of prejudice and an independent judgment are com- 
bated, want of ability and of character are extolled and 
esteemed, but successes arouse hostility and uneasiness. 

I had abandoned opposition to our mad Triple Alliance 
policy, because I saw that it was useless and that my warn- 
ings were represented as Austrophobia and an idee fixe. 
In a policy which is not mere gymnastics, or playing with 
documents, but the conduct of the business of the firm, there 
is no such thing as likes and dislikes; there is nothing but 
the interest of the community; but a policy which is based 
merely upon Austrians, Magyars, and Turks must end in 
hostility to Russia, and ultimately lead to a catastrophe. 

In spite of former aberrations, everything was still possible 
in July, 19 14. Agreement with England had been reached. 
We should have had to send to Petersburg a representative 
who, at any rate, reached the average standard of political 
ability, and we should have had to give Russia the certainty 
that we desired neither to dominate the Straits nor to throttle 
the Serbs. M. Sazonoff was saying to us: "Lachez I'Autriche 
et nous lacherons les Fran^ais." And M. Cambon [French 
Ambassador in Berlin] said to Herr von Jagow: "Vous 
n'avez [pas] besoin de suivre I'Autriche partout." 

We needed neither alliances nor wars, but merely treaties 
which would protect us and others, and which would guar- 
antee us an economic development for which there had been 
no precedent in history. And if Russia had been relieved of 
trouble in the west, she would have been able to turn again 
to the east, and then the Anglo-Russian antagonism would 
have arisen automatically without our interference — and 
the Russo-Japanese antagonism no less than the Anglo- 
Russian. 

We could also have approached the question of limitation 
of armaments, and should have had no further need to 



GERMANY 37 

bother about the confusions of Austria. Austria-Hungary 
would then become the vassal of the German Empire — 
without an alliance, and, above all, without sentimental 
services on our part, leading ultimately to war for the 
liberation of Poland and the destruction of Serbia, although 
German Interests demanded exactly the contrary. 

I had to support in London a policy which I knew to be 
fallacious. I was punished for it, for it was a sin against the 
Holy Ghost. 

On my arrival in Berlin I saw at once that I was to be 
made the scapegoat for the catastrophe of which our Govern- 
ment had made itself guilty in opposition to my advice and 
my warnings. 

The report was persistently circulated by official quarters 
that I had let myself be deceived by Sir Edward Grey, be- 
cause If he had not wanted war Russia would not have 
mobilized. Count Pourtales, whose reports could be relied 
upon, was to be spared. If only because of his family con- 
nections. He was said to have behaved "splendidly," and 
he was enthusiastically praised, while I was all the more 
sharply blamed. 

"What has Russia got to do with Serbia.'"' this statesman 
said to me after eight years of official activity In Petersburg. 
It was made out that the whole business was a perfidious 
British trick which I had not understood. In the Foreign 
Office I was told that in 1916 it would In any case have come 
to war. But then Russia would have been "ready," and so 
it was better now. 

As appears from all official publications, without the facts 
being controverted by our own White Book which, owing 
to Its poverty and gaps, constitutes a grave self-accusation: 

1. We encouraged Count Berchtold to attack Serbia, 
although no German interest was Involved, and the danger 
of a world-war must have been known to us — whether we 
knew the text of the ultimatum is a question of complete 
indifference. 

2. In the days between July 23 and July 30, 1914, when 
M. Sazonoff emphatically declared that Russia could not 
tolerate an attack upon Serbia, we rejected the British 
proposals of mediation, although Serbia, under Russian 
and British pressure, had accepted almost the whole ulti- 



38 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

matum, and although an agreement about the two points 
in question could easily have been reached, and Count 
Berchtold was even ready to satisfy himself with the Serbian 
reply. 

3. On July 30th, when Count Berchtold wanted to give 
way, we, without Austria having been attacked, replied 
to Russia's mere mobilization by sending an ultimatum to 
Petersburg, and on July 31st we declared war on the Rus- 
sians, although the Czar had pledged his word that as long 
as negotiations continued not a man should march — so 
that we deliberately destroyed the possibility of a peaceful 
settlement. 

In view of these indisputable facts, It Is not surprising 
that the whole civilized world outside Germany attributes 
to us the sole guilt for the world-war. 

Is It not intelligible that our enemies declare that they 
will not rest until a system Is destroyed which constitutes a 
permanent threatening of our neighbors? Must they .not 
otherwise fear that in a few years they will again have to 
take up arms, and again see their provinces overrun and their 
towns and villages destroyed.^ Were these people not right 
who prophesied that the spirit of Treitschke and Bernhardi 
dominated the German people — the spirit which glorifies 
war as an aim in itself and does not abhor it as an evil; 
that among us it Is still the feudal knights and Junkers and 
the caste of warriors who rule and who fix our Ideals and 
our values — not the civilian gentleman; that the love of 
duelling, which inspires our youth at the universities, lives 
on in those who guide the fortunes of the people,? Had 
not the events at Zabern and the Parliamentary debates 
on that case shown foreign countries how civil rights and 
freedoms are valued among us, when questions of military 
power are on the other side? 

Cramb, a historian who has since died, an admirer of 
Germany, put the German point of view into the words of 
Euphorion : 

Traumt Ihr den Friedenstag? 
Traume, wer traumen mag! 
Krieg ist das Losungswortl 
Sieg, und so klingt es fort.^ 

^ Goethe's Faust, Part II, Act 3. 



GERMANY 39 

Militarism, really a school for the nation and an irjstru- 
ment of policy, makes policy into the instrument of military 
power, if the patriarchal absolutism of a soldier-kingdom 
renders possible an attitude which would not be permitted 
by a democracy which had disengaged itself from military- 
Junker influences. 

That is what our enemies think, and that is what they 
are bound to think, when they see that, in spite of capitalis- 
tic industrialization, and in spite of Socialistic organization, 
the living, as Friedrich Nietzsche says, are still governed 
by the dead. The principal war aim of our enemies, the 
democratization of Germany, will be achieved. 

To-day, after two years of the war, there can be no further 
doubt that we cannot hope for an unconditional victory 
over Russians, English, French, Italians, Roumanians, and 
Americans, and that we cannot reckon upon the overthrow 
of our enemies. But we can reach a compromise peace only 
upon the basis of the evacuation of the occupied territories, 
the possession of which In any case signifies for us a burden 
and weakness and the peril of new wars. Consequently 
everything should be avoided which hinders a change of 
course on the part of those enemy groups which might 
perhaps still be won over to the Idea of compromise — the 
British Radicals and the Russian Reactionaries. Even from 
this point of view our Polish project Is just as objectionable 
as any interference with Belgian rights, or the execution 
of British citizens — to say nothing of the mad submarine 
war scheme. 

Our future lies upon the water. True, but it therefore 
does not lie in Poland and Belgium, In France and Serbia. 
That is a reversion to the Holy Roman Eijiplre, to the aber- 
rations of the Hohenstaufens and Hapsburgs. It is the 
policy of the Plantagenets, not the policy of Drake and 
Raleigh, Nelson and Rhodes. 

Triple Alliance policy is a relapse Into the past, a revolt 
from the future, from Imperialism, from world policy. 
Central Europe Is medlsevalism; Berlin-Bagdad Is a cul-de-sac 
and not a road Into the open, to unlimited possibilities, and 
to the world mission of the German people. 

I am no enemy of Austria, or Hungary, or Italy, or Serbia, 
or any other State; I am only an enemy of the Triple Alii- 



40 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

ance policy, which was bound to divert us from our aims, 
and to bring us on to the sloping plane of continental policy. 
It was not German policy, but Austrian dynastic policy. 
The Austrians had accustomed themselves to regard the 
alliance as a shield, under whose protection they could 
make excursions at pleasure into the East. 

And what result have we to expect from the struggle of 
peoples? The United States of Africa will be British, like 
the United States of America, of Australia, and of Oceania; 
and the Latin States of Europe, as I said years ago, will 
fall into the same relationship to the United Kingdom as 
the Latin sisters of America to the United States. They 
will be dominated by the Anglo-Saxon; France, exhausted 
by the war, will link herself still more closely to Great 
Britain. In the long run, Spain also will not resist. 

In Asia, the Russians and Japanese will expand their 
borders and their customs, and the south will remain to 
the British. 

The world will belong to the Anglo-Saxon, the Russian, 
and the Japanese, and the German will remain alone with 
Austria and Hungary. His sphere of power will be that of 
thought and of trade, not that of the bureaucrats and the 
soldiers. The German appeared too late, and the world-war 
has destroyed the last possibility of catching up the lost 
ground, of founding a Colonial Empire. 

For we shall not supplant the sons of Japheth; the pro- 
gram of the great Rhodes, who saw the salvation of man- 
kind in British expansion and British Imperialism, will be 
realized. 

Tu regere imperio populos Romano, memento. 
Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem, 
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.^ 

^ Aeneid, bk. vi, 852-854. 



II. BELGIUM 

One of the remarkable developments of the European War 
was the way in which opposition to German purposes evoked 
idealistic enthusiasm even in nations which had been thought 
pre-eminently material or decadent. Particularly was this 
true of Belgium, the country which entered the conflict 
with the most obviously unmixed motives and by her entry 
showed that the war concerned moral rather than physical 
values. 

The distinguished savant and linguist, Dr. Sarolea, who 
most positively predicted the World War, writes of the 
complete ideality of the Belgian sacrifice from a political 
and commercial standpoint. Cardinal Mercier, head of the 
Church in Belgium, pays homage to the heightened re- 
ligious and patriotic ardor that resulted from the suffer- 
ings of the non-combatant population. His high estimate 
of the virtue of patriotism (which should be contrasted 
with Tolstoy's opinion) is the more notable since before 
the war clerical and nationalistic feeling in the Latin coun- 
tries of Europe were usually in bitter opposition. 

It was in the field of literature that Belgian nationality 
had most effectively expressed itself before 1914, particu- 
larly in the work of Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, and Cammaerts. 
Two poems by the last, written in his enforced exile in 
England, during 1916, express a love of country which sep- 
aration has made the more intense. 



(a) THE BELGIAN SACRIFICE 

CHARLES SAROLEA: THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF 
THE BELGIAN CAMPAIGN (1915) 

I 

In the supreme alternative which was thrust upon her with 
such dramatic suddenness, Belgium, we are told, made the 

41 



42 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

right choice. She chose resistance with honor rather than 
surrender with dishonor. But although Belgium, we are told, 
did her duty nobly, she only did her duty. She only fulfilled 
her treaty obligations. I do not think that such a statement 
accurately defines the position of the Belgian people, nor 
does it give the true measure of British indebtedness. I do 
not think that the Belgians merely did their duty. They did 
infinitely more than their duty. It was not expected of Bel- 
gium, it could not be expected of her, that day after day, 
week after week, she should continue to stand between In- 
vading hordes and the allied armies who were preparing 
for the struggle. It could not be expected of her that she 
should continue to resist after the surrender of her fortresses, 
after the capture of her capital. It could not be expected of 
her that she should go on fighting unaided by Great Britain 
and France, left to the mercy of a ruthless conqueror, with 
her villages razed to the ground, with her cities bombarded, 
with her armies bleeding to death, with her women outraged, 
with her old men and children driven out on the road. 



II 

I SUBMIT that Belgium was not In strict honor bound to 
resist to the bitter end. To save her honor It would have been 
enough if she had made a firm stand against the Invader from 
the strong position of the Liege fortresses. It would have 
been enough if she had given the French army a short respite 
to come to the rescue. As the French army was not ready, 
the little Belgian army after the surrender of Liege might 
well have retired under the cover of the walls of Antwerp, 
the last stronghold and refuge of Belgian independence. As 
a matter of fact, no Belgian offensive had ever been con- 
templated. The original plan of campaign devised by the 
genius of Brialmont, a plan which was again and again 
elaborated In classical military treatises, had always been a 
purely defensive one. Liege and Antwerp had always been 
the beginning and the end of Belgian strategy. After the 
defense had broken down, Belgium might have well con- 
cluded an honorable armistice with the enemy. She might 
have tried to save herself from the horrors of a German 
occupation. She might have pleaded that an unequal fight 



BELGIUM 43 

of a hundred thousand against a million could only lead to 
needless slaughter. Belgium would still have satisfied the 
dictates of hcaior. She would still have fulfilled her treaty 
obligations. 

Ill 

We have just stated what Belgium might have done even 
from the high plane of national honor. Let us now consider 
what she might have done from the lower plane of enlight- 
ened self-interest. From that lower plane Belgium was all 
the less bound to risk everything in a life-and-death struggle 
with Germany, as her economic interests, her commercial 
prosperity would still continue to be bound up after the war, 
as before the war, with the interests and prosperity of the 
German Empire. Owing to her geographical position, Ger- 
many must ever be the commercial Hinterland of Belgium. 
In recent years Antwerp had become for all practical pur- 
poses a German commercial metropolis, and twenty thousand 
Germans In Antwerp had taken advantage of Belgian hos- 
pitality. The Belgian sea-coast had become a health resort 
of the German middle classes. Considering the vital com- 
mercial interests involved, Belgian statesmanship might 
have urged that, while opposing with the utmost deter- 
mination the aggression of German militarism, it might still 
be possible to come to terms with the German people. In 
any case, Belgium might have tempered valor with prudence, 
she might have counted the cost, she might have reserved 
for herself a way of retreat, like Italy or Holland. She need 
not have staked her all on a doubtful issue. Such a course 
would certainly have been the safer one. If the Allies did 
win, they would still have respected a neutrality which it 
was their interest to respect, and which moreover Belgium 
would have nobly defended. On the other hand, if the Ger- 
mans did win they would have granted more favorable 
conditions to the Belgians who would have come to honor- 
able terms, who would have refrained from the extremity of 
heroic despair. 

IV 

We are often reminded that the acquisition of wealth and 
power is the controlling factor in determining the policy of 



44 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

any nation. If this were so, Belgium might reasonably have 
thrown in her lot with Germany. So far as material pros- 
perity is concerned, she had everything to gain and nothing 
to lose from the victory of Germany. If Belgium, after offer- 
ing an honorable resistance, had come to honorable terms, 
and if Germany in consequence of that Belgian surrender 
had crushed the French armies as she would certainly have 
done, Belgium would probably after the triumph of Ger- 
many have become part of the Greater German Confedera- 
tion. But she would have remained a self-governing king- 
dom. She would have retained a large measure of autonomy. 
She would never have become another Alsace-Lorraine, 
because Germany would still have had a vital interest in 
promoting the prosperity of Belgium. Antwerp would have 
risen into the most flourishing port on the Continent, 
Brussels Into the most popular German capital. Belgium 
would have received an immense accession of wealth and 
weight instead of remaining a small, insignificant State 
without influence on the world's affairs. Belgium would have 
shared more than any other country in the expansion of the 
German Empire. 

V 

But Belgium preferred to remain a small independent na- 
tion rather than to become a partner in the German Empire. 
She rejected all the greatness that was offered unto her. 
She preferred suffering and death, the burning of her homes, 
the destruction of her cities. The Belgians refused to be- 
come German because they would not give up their national 
personality. If they had become German they would have 
had to accept German discipline and German culture. And 
they would have none of German culture and discipline. 
They preferred to remain loyal to national ideals. And the 
first national Belgian ideal ever was freedom. For a thousand 
years the unruly and turbulent Belgian democracies had 
fought for that ideal. They had asserted it even against 
Spanish tyranny. They had retained it even under Austrian 
rule. 



BELGIUM 45 

VI 

Once more, then, the alternative to the Belgian people in 
this war was not between honor and dishonor. It was not 
between duty and enlightened self-interest. The ultimate 
alternative lay between a commonplace political realism 
and a lofty political idealism. The Belgians preferred the 
unpractical course which meant ruin and starvation to the 
practical, reasonable course which meant ease and comfort 
and material prosperity. They did not choose to take the 
lax and broad view of honor: they took the narrowest path, 
they took the strictest and sternest view. They did not 
adopt the attitude of frigid reason and of enlightened self- 
interest. They took the heroic and disinterested attitude. 
They left entirely out of account all commercial or economic 
considerations. They did not calculate their chances; they 
did not count the cost. They only considered that their 
native soil had been invaded, that they were the victims of 
a cowardly attack on the part of an insolent aggressor, and 
they went out to defend that native soil, to meet that attack, 
to repel that invader, to assert their national independence. 
They only considered that a great crime was being per- 
petrated, and they resisted the perpetrators of that crime. 
They only considered that a great principle was at stake, 
and that they, even they, were the defenders of that prin- 
ciple, and that to them Destiny had entrusted a sublime 
duty. They only considered that even though they might 
be weak, the cause for which they were fighting was invin- 
cible, because it was eternal, because against right and 
justice all the millions of the Kaiser could not ultimately 
prevail. And having once taken the momentous decision, 
they threw themselves into the struggle even as their fore- 
fathers did in encounters innumerable. Flemings and Wal- 
loons, Socialists and Liberals, Clericals and Anti-clericals, 
they all presented a united front to the invaders. They met 
the German Terror in the same spirit in which their fore- 
fathers had met the Spanish Terror in the days of Alva and 
the Inquisition. Inch by inch they defended their territory. 
When Liege was taken they withdrew to Namur. When the 
forts of Namur were blown to atoms by the i6 in. howitzer 
guns, the 12,000 soldiers who had been saved from an army 



46 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

of 26,000 retreated to France, and after three weeks they 
reappeared at Ostend again to take the field. When Brussels 
was captured the Belgians fell back on Antwerp. When 
Termonde was threatened the Belgians burst their dykes and 
flooded the enemy. When the numbers were too small for 
the offensive the Belgians were content with the defensive. 
When a new favorable opportunity arose they resumed the 
offensive. Time after time, cities were captured and recap- 
tured. Even little villages like Hofstade and Sempst were 
again and again taken and retaken. Termonde changed hands 
twice. Malines three times repelled the enemy, and was 
bombarded five times. 

No Britisher has yet learned all the details of the epic 
struggle, but every British school-boy knows the result 
and outcome of the Belgian resistance. Everybody knows 
that by holding in check the Teutonic hordes the little 
Belgian army has been a decisive factor in the final issue. 
If Belgium had not been ready to make the great sacrifice, 
the German armies would certainly have walked over. 
Paris might be and Calais would certainly be to-day in 
the hands of the enemy. In all human probability the 
armies of civilization would have suffered an appalling 
disaster from the hordes of barbarism. The ultimate issue 
might still have been the same, but the war would have 
been more protracted, the carnage infinitely greater, and 
the final victory more distant. 

VII 

I MUST have made it abundantly plain that no mere motives 
of enlightened national interest or even of worldly honor 
could account for the desperate struggle which the Belgian 
people waged against Germany. In order to understand the 
dogged resistance of the Belgians, we must appeal to the 
deepest Instincts of man, to the elemental impulses of liberty. 
And perhaps still more must we appeal to the higher motives 
of outraged justice, to the moral consciousness of right and 
wrong. Until we take in the fact that from the beginning 
the struggle was lifted to a higher plane, we shall fail to 
understand the true significance of the war. From the be- 
ginning the war was to the Belgian people much more than 



BELGIUM 47 

a national war; it became a Holy War. And the expression 
"Holy" War must be understood not as a mere literary 
phrase, but in its literal and exact definition. The Belgian 
War was a crusade of Civilization against Barbarism, of 
eternal right against brute force. 

So true is this that in order adequately and clearly to 
realize the Belgian attitude, we are compelled to illustrate 
our meaning by adducing one of the most mysterious con- 
ceptions of our Christian religion, the notion of vicarious 
suflFering. In theological language Belgium suffered vicariously 
for the sake of Europe. She bore the brunt of the struggle. 
She was left over to the tender mercies of the Invaders. She 
allowed herself to become a battlefield In order that France 
might be free from becoming a shambles. She had to have 
her beautiful capital violated In order that the French capital 
might remain inviolate. She had to submit to vandalism In 
order that humanity elsewhere might be vindicated. She had 
to lose her soul In order to save the soul of Europe. 

VIII 

The general spirit In which the war was waged, the almost 
mystical temper which Inspired the Belgian people, was 
strikingly illustrated at the crisis of Liege. Things were 
looking desperate. It was obvious that unless relief came at 
once to the besieged, the fortresses could hold out no longer. 
On the other hand, it was equally obvious that If relief did 
come Brussels would be saved from the Indignity of German 
occupation. But French and British relief did not come. 
Yet the Belgians did not complain. They were not only dis- 
interested, they were not only heroic, they were calmly re- 
signed. They were Indeed martyrs In the Greek sense of 
the word. They were witnesses for the European cause. 



48 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 



(b) "THE USES OF ADVERSITY" 

CARDINAL MERCIER: PATRIOTISM AND ENDURANCE 

(Christmas, 1914.) 

Better than any other man, perhaps, do I know what our 
unhappy country has undergone. Nor will any Belgian, I 
trust, doubt of what I suffer in my soul, as a citizen and as a 
Bishop, in sympathy with all this sorrow. These last four 
months have seemed to me age-long. By thousands have our 
brave ones been mown down; wives, mothers, are weeping 
for those they shall not see again; hearths are desolate; dire 
poverty spreads; anguish increases. At Malines, at Antwerp, 
the people of two great cities have been given over, the one 
for six hours, the other for thirty-four hours of a continuous 
bombardment, to the throes of death. I have traversed the 
greater part of the districts most terribly devastated in my 
diocese; and the ruins I beheld, and the ashes, were more 
dreadful than I, prepared by the saddest of forebodings, 
could have imagined. Other parts of my diocese, which I 
have not yet had time to visit, have in like manner been laid 
waste. Churches, schools, asylums, hospitals, convents in 
great numbers, are in ruins. Entire villages have all but 
disappeared. At Werchter-Wackerzeel, for instance, out of 
three hundred and eighty homes, a hundred and thirty re- 
main; at Tremeloo two-thirds of the village are overthrown; 
at Bueken out of a hundred houses twenty are standing; at 
Schaffen one hundred and eighty-nine houses out of two 
hundred are destroyed — eleven still stand. At Louvain the 
third part of the buildings are down; one thousand and 
seventy-four dwellings have disappeared; on the town land 
and in the suburbs, one thousand eight hundred and twenty- 
three houses have been burnt. 

In this dear city of Louvain, perpetually in my thoughts, 
the magnificent church of St. Peter will never recover its 
former splendor. The ancient college of St. Ives, the art 
schools, the consular and commercial schools of the Univer- 
sity, the old markets, our rich library with its collections, its 
unique and unpublished manuscripts. Its archives, its gal- 
lery of great portraits of illustrious rectors, chancellors, pro- 



BELGIUM 49 

fessors, dating from the time of its foundation, which pre- 
served for masters and students alike a noble tradition and 
were an incitement in their studies — all this accumulation 
of intellectual, of historic, and of artistic riches, the fruit of 
the labors of five centuries — all is in the dust. 

Many a parish lost its pastor. There is now sounding in 
my ears the sorrowful voice of an old man of whom I asked 
whether he had had Mass on Sunday in his battered church. 
"It is two months," he said, "since we had a church." The 
parish priest and the curate had been interned in a concen- 
tration camp. 

Thousands of Belgian citizens have in like manner been 
deported to the prisons of Germany, to Miinsterlagen, to 
Celle, to Magdeburg. At Miinsterlagen alone three thousand 
one hundred civil prisoners were numbered. History will tell 
of the physical and moral torments of their long martyrdom. 
Hundreds of innocent men were shot. I possess no complete 
necrology; but I know that there were ninety-one shot at 
Aerschot, and that there, under pain of death, their fellow 
citizens were compelled to dig their graves. In the Louvain 
group of communes one hundred and seventy-six persons, 
men and women, old men and sucklings, rich and poor, in 
health and sickness, were shot or burnt. 

In my diocese alone I know that thirteen priests or re- 
ligious were put to death. One of these, the parish priest of 
Gelrode, suffered, I believe, a veritable martyrdom. I made a 
pilgrimage to his grave, and, amid the little flock which so. 
lately he had been feeding with the zeal of an apostle, there 
did I pray to him that from the height of Heaven he would 
guard his parish, his diocese, his country. 

We can neither number our dead nor compute the measure 
of our ruins. And what would it be if we turned our sad steps 
towards Liege, Namur, Audenne, Dinant, Tamines, Char- 
leroi, and elsewhere.? 

And there where lives were not taken, and there where the 
stones of buildings were not thrown down, what anguish 
unrevealed! Families, hitherto living at ease, now in bitter 
want; all commerce at an end, all careers ruined; industry at 
a standstill; thousands upon thousands of working-men 
without employment; working-women, shop-girls, humble 
servant-girls without the means of earning their bread; and 



50 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

poor souls forlorn on the bed of sickness and fever, crying, 
"O Lord, how long, how long?" 

There is nothing to reply. The reply remains the secret 
of God. 



God will save Belgium, my Brethren, you cannot doubt it. 

Nay rather, He is saving her. 

Across the smoke of conflagration, across the stream of 
blood, have you not glimpses, do you not perceive signs, of 
His love for us.^ Is there a patriot among us who does not 
know that Belgium has grown great? Nay, which of us would 
have the heart to cancel this last page of our national history.'* 
Which of us does not exult in the brightness of the glory of 
this shattered nation? When in her throes she brings forth 
heroes, our Mother Country gives her own energy to the 
blood of those sons of hers. Let us acknowledge that we 
needed a lesson in patriotism. There were Belgians, and 
many such, who wasted their time and their talents in futile 
quarrels of class with class, of race with race, of passion with 
personal passion. 

Yet when, on the second of August, a mighty foreign 
power, confident in its own strength and defiant of the faith 
of treaties, dared to threaten us in our independence, then 
did all Belgians, without difference of party, or of condition, 
or of origin, rise up as one man, close-ranged about their 
■ own king, and their own government, and cry to the invader: 
"Thou shalt not go through!" 

At once, instantly, we were conscious of our own patriot- 
ism. For down within us all is something deeper than per- 
sonal interests, than personal kinships, than party feeling, 
and this is the need and the will to devote ourselves to that 
more general interest which Rome termed the public thing, 
Res puhlica. And this profound will within us is patriotism. 

Our country is not a mere concourse of persons or of 
families inhabiting the same soil, having amongst them- 
selves relations, more or less intimate, of business, of neigh- 
borhood, of a community of memories, happy or unhappy. 
Not so; it is an association of living souls, subject to a social 
organization to be defended and safeguarded at all costs, 
even the cost of blood, under the leadership of those presiding 



BELGIUM 51 

over Its fortunes. And it is because of this general spirit that 
the people of a country live a common life in the present, 
through the past, through the aspirations, the hopes, the 
confidence in a life to come, which they share together. 
Patriotism, an internal principle of order and of unity, an 
organic bond of the members of a nation, was placed by 
the finest thinkers of Greece and Rome at the head of the 
natural virtues. Aristotle, the prince of the philosophers of 
antiquity, held disinterested service of the City — that is, 
the State — to be the very ideal of human duty. And the 
religion of Christ makes of patriotism a positive law; there 
is no perfect Christian who is not also a perfect patriot. For 
our religion exalts the antique Ideal, showing it to be realiz- 
able only in the Absolute. Whence, in truth, comes this 
universal, this irresistible impulse which carries at once the 
will of the whole nation in one single effort of cohesion and 
of resistance In face of the hostile menace against her unity 
and her freedom.^ Whence comes it that in an hour all Inter- 
ests were merged in the interest of all, and that all lives were 
together ofi"ered in willing immolation.^ Not that the State Is 
worth more, essentially, than the individual or the family, 
seeing that the good of the family and of the Individual is 
the cause and reason of the organization of the State. Not 
that our country is a Moloch on whose altar lives may 
lawfully be sacrificed. The rigidity of ancient morals and 
the despotism of the Caesars suggested that false principle — 
and modern militarism tends to revive it — that the State is 
omnipotent, and that the discretionary power of the State 
is the rule of Right. Not so, replies Christian theology, 
Right is Peace, that Is, the Interior order of a nation, founded 
upon Justice. And Justice itself Is absolute only because It 
formulates the essential relation of man with God and of 
man with man. Moreover, war for the sake of war is a crime. 
War Is justifiable only if It is the necessary means for securing 
peace. St. Augustine has said: "Peace must not be a prepara- 
tion for war. And war is not to be made except for the attain- 
ment of peace." In the light of this teaching, which is re- 
peated by St. Thomas Aquinas, patriotism Is seen In its 
religious character. Family interests, class interests, party 
interests, and the material good of the individual take their 
place, in the scale of values, below the ideal of patriotism, 



52 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

for that ideal is Right, which is absolute. Furthermore, that 
ideal is the public recognition of Right in national matters, 
and of national Honor. Now there is no Absolute except 
God. God alone, by His sanctity and His sovereignty, domi- 
nates all human interests and human wills. And to affirm 
the absolute necessity of the subordination of all things 
to Right, to Justice, and to Truth is implicitly to affirm 
God. 

When, therefore, humble soldiers whose heroism we praise 
answer us with characteristic simplicity, "We only did our 
duty," or "We were bound in honor," they express the re- 
ligious character of their patriotism. Which of us does not 
feel that patriotism is a sacred thing, and that a violation 
of national dignity is in a manner a profanation and a sac- 
rilege.'' 



(c) EXILE LONGINGS 

EMILE CAMMAERTS: THE LAST BOCHE 

(Translated by Tita Brand-Cammaerts.) 

I DREAM of that great day when they will leave us. 

When, 'twixt two rows of poplar or of pine. 

Their cannons and their wagons 

Will roll towards the Rhine, 

And, on every road 

In Ardennes and in Flanders, 

From the Meuse to the Scheldt, from the Dendre to the 

Yser, 
From the sea to the Lys, 
They'll slowly drag their bruised feet. 

I call to mind their uncouth shapes, 

And, beneath the helmet. 

The apoplectic neck. 

And the comic dance 

Of the flapping skirt 

Of their tunic. 

And their heavy heels 

Which have lost their spurs. 



BELGIUM S3 

I dream of that great day on which the enemy 

Will quit the land, 

While a storm of songs and shouts, 

Waving of flags and beat of drums, 

Will greet with joyous uproar 

Their departure. 

Though it be a uhlan, a jaeger, 

A dragoon, a hussar, or gunner, 

What matter? 

Though it be in winter, though it be in summer, 

'Neath gray or cheerful skies, 

In the rain or in the sun, 

What matter? 

Though it be sooner, though it be later, 

In one month or in ten, 

What matter? 

If it be but given us to see, 

From the threshold of our door — 

While every happy church bell 

Rings a tallyho — 

The gray back 

Of the last Boche. 

EMILE CAMMAERTS: THE LOVE OF COUNTRY 

(Translated by Tita Brand-Cammaerts.) 

'Tis the sound of a voice. 

The chime of a bell, 

A clearing in a wood, 

A sunbeam on the plain. 

'Tis a certain roof, 'neath a certain sky. 

And the measured step of towmen on the bank. 

'Tis a farmstead kneeling before a shrine, 

By the side of a path, where some candles weep. 

'Tis the smell of the grass around a pond 

And the scent of the dust on the road. 

'Tis a timid movement, a furtive glance, 

A vision of the past, gone by in a flash . . . 

'Tis all we cannot say 

And all that we feel, 



54 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

All that only can be told 
In singing. 

'Tis what we eat, and what we see, 

What we breathe, and what we hear. 

The taste of tobacco and daily bread, 

The glimmer of leaves and smell of the wind. 

All the well known village sounds : 

The barking of dogs, men calling in the fields, 

And the merry clatter 

Of the glasses 'neath the trees . . .. 

'Tis all we cannot say 

And all that we feel. 

All that only can be told 

In singing. 

It is the best of our body. 

The purest of our blood, 

'Tis what recalls our dead to us 

And makes us yearn for children. 

'Tis the color of our life 

And the flavor of our songs, 

'Tis the old sweet madness 

Of gathering what we sow, 

And the foolish passion 

Of owning what we love . . . 

'Tis all we cannot say 

And all that we feel, 

All that only can be told 

In singing. » 



III. FRANCE 

Only a great crisis manifests the tenacity of the French 
spirit, which under superficial levity maintains a marvelous 
continuity and loyalty to principle. Alphonse Daudet, in 
the stress of emotion caused by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine 
in 1871, and Maurice Barres, in the midst of the terrible 
sacrifices of the late war, portray the undying spirit of 
France as a sort of tutelary deity which from age to age 
inspires every true Frenchman. 

In contrast, the Prussian spirit seems to the French a 
wooden machine-like thing, particularly sinister and menac- 
ing because soulless. Thus, in a very brilliant essay, the 
philosopher, Henri Bergson, explains the war as due to 
the inevitable clash between the human or French and 
the mechanistic or Prussian conception of life. So, again, 
the internationalist Romain Rolland, author of "Jean- 
Chrlstophe," though refusing to speak as a French patriot, 
yet shows himself typically French in basing his reproach 
of Germany chiefly upon her lack of reverence for monu- 
ments and ideals of the past. German Kultur is temporal, 
lawless, artificial; French Civilization is an ancient, price- 
less heritage, imposing limits which only barbarism would 
overstep. 

(a) ''VIVE LA FRANCE!" 

ALPHONSE DAUDET: THE LAST CLASS, A LITTLE 
ALSATIAN'S STORY ^ 

That morning I was very late going to school, and I was in 
great fear of a scolding — all the more as Monsieur Hamel 
had told us that he would quiz us on the participles and I 

^ This story, written immediately after the Franco-Prussian war, occupies first 
place in Daudet's "Contes du Lundi," published 1873. The translation has been 
made for the present volume. Daudet's treatment of the Alsatian problem should 
be compared with Treitschke's, which was written contemporaneously (see pp. zff.). 

55 



S6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

did not know the first thing about them. For a moment I 
had the idea of cutting the class and taking my way across 
the fields. The weather was so warm, so clear! One could 
hear the blackbirds whistling on the edge of the wood, 
and in the field behind the sawmill the Prussians were 
drilling. 

All that interested me far more than rules about par- 
ticiples; but I had strength of mind to resist and ran fast 
towards the school. As I passed in front of the mayor's office, 
I saw that some people had stopped near the little notice 
board. It was from there that all the bad news had reached 
us for two years: the lost battles, the requisitions, the orders 
from Headquarters; and without stopping I thought, 
"What is it now.'"' Then, as I ran across the square, Wachter 
the blacksmith, who was there with his apprentice in the 
act of reading the notice, called out to me: "Don't hurry so, 
little one, you will get to your school soon enough." 

I thought he was making fun of me, and entered Mon- 
sieur Hamel's little courtyard quite out of breath. Ordinarily, 
at the beginning of school there was a great noise audible as 
far as the street: desks opened and closed, lessons repeated 
aloud in confusion as everybody stuffed his fingers in his 
ears to assist concentration, and the master's heavy ruler 
striking on the tables: "A little silence!" I counted on all 
this noise in order to gain my bench without being seen; but 
on that special day all was quiet as a Sunday morning. 
Through the open window I saw my comrades already seated 
in their places and Monsieur Hamel passing to and fro with 
the terrible iron ruler under his arm. I had to open the door 
and enter In the midst of this great calm. Imagine whether 
I was red-faced and scared! 

But no. Monsieur Hamel looked at me without anger and 
said very gently, "Go to your place quickly, little Frantz; 
we were going to begin without you." I got my legs over the 
bench and immediately sat down at my desk. Then only, as I 
recovered a little from my fear, did I observe that our 
master had on his beautiful green frock coat, his fine ruffled 
shirt, and the black silk embroidered cap which he wore only 
on inspection days and at distribution of prizes. Moreover, 
there was something extraordinary and solemn about the 
whole school. But what surprised me most was to see at the 



FRANCE 57 

end of the room, on the benches which ordinarily remained 
empty, people of the village sitting silent just like us: old 
Hauser with his cocked hat, the ex-mayor, the ex-postman, 
and other persons besides. All these notables seemed sad, 
and Hauser had brought an old dog-eared primer which he 
held open on his knees with his huge spectacles laid across 
the pages. 

While I remained astonished at all this. Monsieur Hamel 
had ascended to his desk, and in the same sweetly grave 
voice with which he had received me, he said to us: "Chil- 
dren, this is the last time that I shall hold your class. Orders- 
have come from Berlin to teach nothing but German hence- 
forth In the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. The new master 
arrives to-morrow. To-day is your last lesson in French. I 
beg you to be attentive." These few words overwhelmed me. 
Ah, the wretches! That was what they had posted at the 
mayor's office. My last lesson in French! And I hardly know- 
ing how to write. I would then never learn. It would all have 
to stop right there. 

How angry I was now with myself for the time lost, the 
classes missed to run after birds' nests and go sliding on the 
Sarre. My books, which just a moment ago I found so 
burdensome, so heavy to carry, my grammar, my sacred 
history, now seemed to me like old friends whom It would 
give me much sorrow to part from-. And so with Monsieur 
Hamel. The idea that he was going away, that I should not 
see him again, made me forget the punishments he had in- 
flicted upon me. Poor man! It was In honor of this last class 
that he put on his fine Sunday clothes; and now I under- 
stood why these old village people had come to sit at the 
end of the room. That seemed to say that they regretted not 
having come to school oftener. It was also, as It were, a way 
of thanking our master for his forty years of faithful service 
and of paying homage to the native country which was 
slipping from them. 

My reflections had reached this point, when I heard my 
name called; it was my turn to recite. What would I not have 
given to be able to repeat fully that famous rule for the parti- 
ciples, quite loud, quite clear, without one mistake! But I got 
confused on the first words and remained standing, balancing 
myself on my bench, with heavy heart, not daring to raise 



S8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

my head. I heard Monsieur Hamel talking to me: "I won't 
scold you, my little Frantz; you must be sufficiently pun- 
ished already. This is how it is. Every day one says: *'Bah! 
I have plenty of time, I will learn to-morrow." And then you 
see what happens. Ah! that has been the great misfortune of 
our Alsace — always to put off learning till to-morrow. Now 
those people have the right to say to us: "How! You kept 
pretending to be French, and you don't know how either 
to speak or write your language!" In all that, it isn't you, 
poor Frantz, who are most guilty. We all have a good deal 
to reproach ourselves with. Your parents haven't cared 
enough about seeing you taught; they liked better to send 
you to work in the earth or the spinning factories in order 
to gain a few extra sous. And have I nothing to blame my- 
self ior? Have I not often made you water my garden in- 
stead of working.? And when I wanted to go trout-fishing, 
did I feel any embarrassment about giving you a holiday .f* 

Then from one thing to another Monsieur Hamel came to 
tell us of the French language, saying that it was the most 
beautiful language in the world, the clearest and the strong- 
est; that we must preserve it among us and never forget it, 
because when a people falls into slavery, so long as it retains 
its language well, it is as if it held the key of its prison. Then 
he took a grammar, and read us our lesson. I was astonished 
to see how well I understood. All that he told me seemed 
easy. I believe that I had never listened so well, and that he 
too had never put so much patience into his explanations. 
One would have said that before going away the poor dear 
man wished to give us all his knowledge, to get it all into our 
heads with one single eifort. 

The lesson over, we passed to writing. For that day Mon- 
sieur Hamel had prepared for us brand new patterns on 
which was written in fine round hand: France, Alsace! France, 
Alsace! That had the eifect of little flags floating around the 
class, suspended over our desks. One should have seen how 
everybody applied himself; and what silence! Nothing was to 
be heard but the scratching of the pens on the paper. Once 
some June-bugs flew in, but no one paid any attention, not 
even the very little ones, who kept at work tracing their 
beginners' strokes with an ardor, a conscientiousness, as if 
they too were something French. 



FRANCE 59 

On the roof of the school some pigeons were cooing very 
softly, and I said to myself as I heard them, "Are they not 
going to oblige them too to sing in German?" From time to 
time, when I raised my eyes above my page, I saw Monsieur 
Hamel, motionless on his raised platform, fixing the objects 
around him with his eyes, as if he had wished to carry away a 
complete mental picture of his little schoolhouse. 

Think of it! For forty years he had been there in the same 
place, with his courtyard facing him and his class in the 
same position. Only the benches and desks had got polished, 
rubbed by use; the walnut-trees in the courtyard had grown, 
and the hop-vine which he had himself planted now en- 
circled the windows to the very roof. What a heart-break 
it must be for the poor man to leave all that, and to hear his 
sister coming and going in the room above, as she packed 
their trunks! For they were to depart the next day, to leave 
the country for ever! 

Nevertheless he had the courage to conduct our class to 
the very end. After writing, we had the lesson In history; 
then the little ones sang together the BA, BE, BI, BO, BU, 
Down there at the end of the room, old Hauser had put on 
his spectacles, and was holding his primer In both hands; 
he spelled the letters with them. It was evident that he was 
applying himself, he too. His voice trembled with emotion, 
and it was so funny to hear him that we all wanted to laugh 
and to cry. Ah! I shall remember this last class. 

Suddenly the church clock sounded midday, then the 
Angelus. At the same moment the trumpets of the Prus- 
sians returning from drill blared out under our windows. 
Monsieur Hamel raised himself, quite pale, on his platform. 
Never had he seemed to me so great. "My friends," he said, 
"I — I" — but something choked him; he could not finish 
his phrase. 

Then he turned to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk, 
and, bearing down with all his strength, he wrote as large as 
he could, "VIVE LA FRANCE!" Then he remained there, 
his head resting against the wall, and without speaking, with 
his hand, made us the sign, "It is finished. . . . You may 
go." 



6o WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

MAURICE BARRES : THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF FRANCE ' 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 

In his Litany of Nations your poet Swinburne puts these 
words Into the mouth of France apostrophizing Liberty: 

I am she that was thy sign and standard-bearer, 

Thy voice and cry; 
She that washed thee with her blood and left thee fairer, 

The same was I. 
Were not these the hands that raised thee fallen and fed thee, 

These hands defiled? 
Was not I thy tongue that spake, thine eye that led thee, 

Not I thy child ? 

How many men and how many nations, since 1870, have 
believed that we were unworthy of this eulogy that so 
touched our hearts. We were mistrusted. They said of us: 
"They are no longer what they were . . . France is a na- 
tion grown old, an ancient nation." 

Especial stress was laid upon the Idea of France as an old 
nation. And therein they expressed but the truth; France 
was when no such thing existed as Germanic consciousness, 
or Italian or English consciousness; In truth we were the 
first nation of all Europe to grasp the idea of constituting a 
home-land; but there seems no reason why claims of such a 
nature should work to our discredit with nations of more 
recent origin. 

Among those who thus spoke there were many who looked 
upon us without animosity, sometimes even with sympathy. 
According to them France had In the past laid up a vast store 
of virtues, noble deeds, and glorious achievements beyond 
compare, but to-day is seated in the midst of these like an 
old man in the evening of the most successful of lives, or 
still more like certain worldly aristocrats of illustrious line- 
age, who have preserved of their inheritance only their 
titles of nobility, charming manners, superb portraits, regal 
tapestries and books adorned with coats of arms, all denoting 
sumptuous but trivial luxury. 

It was in this wise, as we well understand, that we had 
come to be regarded as jaded triflers, far too affluent and 

' An Address delivered in London, at the Hal! of the Royal Society, under the 
auspices of the British Academy, July 12,. 1916. 



FRANCE 6i 

light-hearted, with pleasure as our only concern; the French 
people were supposed to allow impulse and passion to de- 
termine the course of their lives, pleasure being the supreme 
good sought, and to Paris came representatives from every 
nation to share in this pleasure. 

Small wonder that the undiscerning foreigner, intoxi- 
cated by the easy and cosmopolitan pleasures of Paris, failed 
to recognize the underlying force present at every French 
fireside, which prides itself upon keeping remote and isolated 
from the passing crowd, or what was stirring in hearts ever 
hearkening the call to a crusade and needing, as it were, 
but the voice from a supernatural world to bring forth and 
reveal to themselves their inherent heroism. 



I 

August, 1914. The call to arms resounds. The bells in every 
village echo in the towers of the ancient churches whose 
foundations arise from amidst the dead. These bells have sud- 
denly become the voice of the land of France. They call 
together the men, they express compassion for the women; 
their clamor is so stupendous that it seems as if the very 
tombs would crumble, and all at once the French heart is 
unlocked and all the tenderness that has so long been kept 
concealed comes forth. 

Women, old men and children flock about the soldier, 
following him to the train. This is the hour of departure, 
not as Rude has depicted it, — carried along in the storm and 
stress of the Marseillaise., but a departure even more tragic 
in tone, in which the soldier mutters through set teeth: 
"Since they will have it, we must end it forever." 

The departure! We cannot be at the same moment in all 
the railroad stations of Paris and of all our cities, towns and 
villages, on all the docks, nor upon all the boats bringing 
back loyal Frenchmen from abroad. Suppose we go to the 
very heart of military France, to the school of Saint Cyr 
where the young officers receive their training. 

Every year at Saint Cyr the Fete du Triomphe Is celebrated 
with great pomp. Upon this occasion is performed a tradi- 
tional ceremony in which the young men who have just 
finished their two years' course at the school proceed to 



62 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

christen the class following it and bestow a name upon their 
juniors. 

In July, 1914, this ceremony came just at the time of the 
events which in their hasty course brought on the war, and 
for that reason was to assume a more than usually serious 
character. 

On the thirty-first of the month the general in command 
at the school made known to the Montmirails (the name of 
the graduating class), that they would have to christen their 
juniors that same evening, and only according to military 
regulations, without the accustomed festivities. 

All understood that perhaps during the night they would 
have to join their respective regiments. 

Listen to the words of a young poet of the Montmirail 
class, Jean Allard-Meeus, as he tells his mother of the events 
of this evening, already become legendary among his com- 
patriots: "After dinner the Assumption of Arms {prise 
(Tarmes) before the captain and the lieutenant on guard duty, 
the only officers entitled to witness this sacred rite. A lovely 
evening; the air Is filled with almost oppressive fragrance; 
the most perfect order prevails amidst unbroken silence. 
The Montmirails are drawn up, officers with swords, 'men' 
with guns. The two classes take their places on the parade 
ground under command of the major of the higher class. Ex- 
cellent patriotic addresses; then, in the midst of growing 
emotion, I recited 

To-MORROW 

Soldiers of our Illustrious race, 

Sleep, for your memories are sublime. 
- ■ Old time erases not the trace 

Of famous names graved on the tomb. 

Sleep; beyond the frontier line 

Ye soon will sleep, once more at home. 

"Never again, dearest mother, shall I repeat those lines, 
for never again shall I be on the eve of departure for out 
there, amongst a thousand young men trembling with 
feverish excitement, pride and hatred. Through my own emo- 
tion I must have touched upon a responsive chord, for I 
ended my verses amidst a general thrill. Oh, why did not 
the clarion sound the Call to Arms at their close! We should 
all have carried Its echoes with us as far as the Rhine." 



FRANCE 63 

It was surrounded by this atmosphere of enthusiasm that 
the young officers received the title of Croix du Drapeau for 
their class upon their promotion and it was at this juncture 
that one of the Montmirails, Gaston Voizard, cried out: 
"Let us swear to go into battle in full dress uniform, with 
white gloves and the plume (casoar) in our hats." 

"We swear it," made answer the five hundred of the 
Montmirail. 

"We swear it," echoed the voices of the five hundred of 
the Croix du Drapeau. 

A terrible scene and far too characteristically French, 
permeated by the admirable innocence and readiness to 
serve of these young men, and permeated, likewise, with 
disastrous consequences. 

They kept their rash vow. It Is not permissible for me to 
tell you the proportion of those who thus met death. These 
attractive boys of whom I have been telling you are no more. 
How have they fallen "i 

There were not witnesses in all cases, but they all met 
death in the same way as did Lieutenant de Fayolle. 

On the twenty-second of August Alain de Fayolle of the 
Croix du Drapeau was at Charleroi leading a section. His 
men hesitate. The young sub-lieutenant has put on his white 
gloves but discovers that he has forgotten his plume. He 
draws from his saddle-bag the red and white plume and 
fastens it to his shako. 

"You will get killed, my lieutenant," protested a cor- 
poral. 

"Forward!" shouts the young officer. 

His men follow him, electrified. A few moments later a 
bullet strikes him In the middle of his forehead, just below 
the plume. 



For more than a thousand years now this mighty stream 
of feats of valor has been flowing In undiminished volume. 
We have just been dipping into it; we could carry away from 
the passing flood only what could be contained in our two 
hands held together. And what about It all.^ What is proved 
by these entrancing and heroic achievements, this life be- 
neath the surface, this overflowing French spirit? 



64 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

The French make war as a religious duty. They were the 
first to formulate the idea of a holy war. The soldier of the 
year XL, believing himself the bearer of liberty and equality 
to a captive world, dedicated himself with the same zeal and 
in the same spirit as the Crusaders to Jerusalem. When the 
Crusader shouts "God wills it," when the volunteer at 
Valmy shouts "The Republic calls us," it is but another 
form of the same battle-cry. The idea is that of bringing 
about more of justice and more of beauty in the world. To 
both a voice from Heaven or their conscience speaks, saying: 

"If you die, you will be holy martyrs." ^ 

It is not in France that wars are entered upon for the sake 
of the spoils. Wars for the sake of honor and glory .f* Yes, at 
times. But to carry the nation with it the people must feel 
itself a champion in the cause of God, a knight upholding 
justice. We have to be convinced that we are contending 
against Barbarians, — in former days against Islam, at the 
present time against Pan Germanism, or against the despotic 
Prussian militarism and German imperialism. 

Frenchmen fighting in defense of their country have be- 
lieved almost always that they were suffering and enduring 
that all humanity might be the better. They fight for their 
territory filled with sepulchers and for Heaven where Christ 
reigns, and up to which at least our aspirations rise. They 
die for France, as far as the purposes of France may be 
identified with the purposes of God or indeed with those of 
humanity. Thus it is that they wage war in the spirit of 
martyrs. 

Would you have me present to your minds a wonderful 
theme; would you know how our forefathers, nine centuries 
ago, were persuaded to go on Crusade.^ You would learn at 
the same time how our soldiers of the present day ought to 
be addressed. Listen to the words of Pope Urban II. (a native 
of France, born in Champagne) as he preached before the 
Council of Clermont in Auvergne: "People of France," he 
said, "nation elect of God, as is shown by your deeds, and 
beloved of God, distinguished above all others by your 
devotion to the holy faith and to the Church, it is to you that 

^ Se vous mourez, esterez sainz martirs. La Chanson de Roland. — Archbishop Turpin 
before the battle, to the army on its knees. 



FRANCE 6s 

our word and our exhortation Is directed. . . . Upon whom 
may be laid the task of avenging the outrageous acts of the 
Unbelievers If not upon you, Frenchmen, to whom God has 
vouchsafed more than to any other people, Illustrious dis- 
tinction In arms, exalted hearts and agile bodies with the 
power to bend those who oppose you? May your souls be 
stirred and quickened by the deeds of your ancestors, the 
valor and might of your King Charlemagne, of his son Louis, 
and of your other kings, who have overthrown the dominion 
of the heathen and extended the confines of the Holy 
Church! . . . O very valiant knights, offspring of an in- 
vincible lineage, recall to mind the prowess of your fathers!" 
That was the right way to put things before our noble an- 
cestors. And that is how they were pleaded with by Jeanne 
d'Arc, who called herself "the Daughter of God" {Fille 
Dieu). Bonaparte adopted the same tone and with him the 
republican generals, and it is still the same spirit with which 
the hearts of our soldiers are kindled when they rush forward 
out of the trenches singing the Marseillaise under the benlson 
of their chaplains. 

Doubtless reason does its part in affecting and convincing 
us. The argument Is used that France is a real and tangible 
masterpiece whose outline must be perfected and maintained, 
that Strasbourg and Metz are essential to her existence, that 
she needs to establish the balance to her southern population 
by accessions to the north and east, that she will be as if 
disarmed and open to attack as long as she remains deprived 
of her natural frontiers. But this would still leave many 
apathetic. To be ready to sacrifice their lives the sons of 
France demand that they shall not die for the cause of 
France alone. 

There came a time when France burst the chain of her 
traditions and lost from sight even her memories of the past; 
nevertheless to her spiritual nature she still remained faith- 
ful. In each succeeding generation she has brought forth 
Rolands, Godfreys of Bouillon, Bayards, Turennes, Mar- 
ceaus, unfamiliar as these names might have become, and 
at all times she is elate with sentiments which vary only 
in form of expression. 

The epic drowses at times, but never, from the beginning, 
was it more fired by brotherly love and zeal for religion than 



66 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

at the present hour. Many passages from the Old Testament, 
obscure and of small moment in themselves, do not reveal 
their full meaning except in the light of the New, so the feats 
of valor performed by knights of old and our revered an- 
cestors seem but the prefiguration of richer and holier things 
of to-day. The entire history of our nation would appear 
to have been leading up to what we have witnessed during 
the past two years. 

Millions of Frenchmen have entered this war with a 
fervor of heroism and martyrdom which formerly, in the 
most exalted epochs of our history, characterized only the 
flower of the combatants. Young or old, poor or rich, and 
whatever his religious faith, the French soldier of 1916 knows 
that his is a nation which intervenes when injustice prevails 
upon the earth, and in his muddy trench, gun in hand, he 
knows that he is carrying onward the Gesia Dei per Francos. 



(b) THE BOCHE PERIL 

HENRI BERGSON: LIFE AND MATTER AT WAR 
(December, 1914.) 

"CoMPRENDRE ct ne pas s'indigner": this has been said to 
be the last word of philosophy. I believe none of it; and, had 
I to choose, I should much prefer, when in presence of crime, 
to give my indignation rein and not to understand. Happily, 
the choice has not to be made. On the contrary, there are 
forms of anger which, by a thorough comprehension of their 
objects, derive the force to sustain and renew their vigor. 
Our anger is of that kind. We have only to detach the inner 
meaning of this war, and our horror for those who made it 
will be increased. Moreover, nothing is easier. A little history, 
and a little philosophy, will suffice. 

For a long period Germany devoted herself to poetry, to 
art, to metaphysic. She was made, so she said, for thought 
and imagination; "she had no feeling for the reality of 
things." It is true that her administration had defects, that 
she was divided into rival states, that anarchy at certain 
times seemed beyond remedy. Nevertheless, an attentive 
study would have revealed, beneath this disorder, the nor- 



FRANCE 67 

mal process of life, which is always too rank at the first and 
later on prunes away its excess, makes its choice and adopts 
a lasting form. From her municipal activity there would have 
issued at length a good administration which would have 
assured order without suppressing liberty. From the closer 
union of the confederated states that unity in diversity, 
which is the distinguishing mark of organized beings, would 
have arisen. But time was needed for that, as it always is 
needed by life, in order that its possibilities may be realized. 

Now, while Germany was thus working out the task of 
her organic self-development there was within her, or rather 
by her side, a people with whom every process tended to 
take a mechanical form. Artificiality marked the creation of 
Prussia; for she was formed by clumsily sewing together, 
edge to edge, provinces either acquired or conquered. Her 
administration was mechanical; it did its work with the 
regularity of a well-appointed machine. Not less mechani- 
cal — extreme both in precision and in power — was the army, 
on which the attention of the Hohenzollerns was concen- 
trated. Whether it was that the people had been drilled for 
centuries to mechanical obedience; or that an elemental 
instinct for conquest and plunder, absorbing to itself the 
life of the nation, had simplified its aims and reduced them 
to materialism; or that the Prussian character was originally 
so made — it is certain that the idea of Prussia always evoked 
a vision of rudeness, of rigidity, of automatism, as if every- 
thing within her went by clockwork, from the gesture of her 
kings to the step of her soldiers. 

A day came when Germany had to choose between a rigid 
and ready-made system of unification, mechanically super- 
posed from without, and the unity which comes from within 
by a natural efi"ort of life. At the same time the choice was 
offered her between an administrative mechanism, into 
which she would merely have to fit herself — a complete 
order, doubtless, but poverty-stricken, like everything else 
that is artificial— and that richer and more flexible order 
which the wills of men, when freely associated, evolve of 
themselves. How would she choose .f* 

There was a man on the spot in whom the methods of 
Prussia were incarnate — a genius, I admit, but an evil genius; 
for he was devoid of scruple, devoid of faith, devoid of pity, 



68 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

and devoid of soul. He had just removed the only obstacle 
which could spoil his plan; he had got rid of Austria. He said 
to himself: "We are going to make Germany take over, 
along with Prussian centralization and discipline, all our 
ambitions and all our appetites. If she hesitates, if the con- 
federate peoples do not arrive of their own accord at this 
common resolution, I know how to compel them; I will cause 
a breath of hatred to pass over them, all alike. I will launch 
them against a common enemy, an enemy we have hood- 
winked and waylaid, and whom we shall try to catch un- 
armed. Then when the hour of triumph shall sound, I will 
rise up; from Germany, in her intoxication, I will snatch a 
covenant, which, like that of Faust with Mephistopheles, 
she has signed with her blood, and by which she also, like 
Faust, has traded her soul away for the good things of 
earth." 

He did as he had said. The covenant was made. But, to 
ensure that it would never be broken, Germany must be 
made to feel, for ever and ever, the necessity of the armor in 
which she was imprisoned. Bismarck took his measures ac- 
cordingly. Among the confidences which fell from his lips 
and were gathered up by his intimates is this revealing 
word: "We took nothing from Austria after Sadowa because 
we wanted to be able one day to be reconciled with her." 
So, then, in taking Alsace and a part of Lorraine, his idea 
was that no reconciliation with the French would be possi- 
ble. He intended that the German people should believe 
Itself in permanent danger of war, that the new Empire 
should remain armed to the teeth, and that Germany, in- 
stead of dissolving Prussian militarism Into her own life, 
should reinforce It by militarizing herself. 

She reinforced it; and day by day the machine grew in 
complexity and power. But In the process it yielded auto- 
matically a result very different from that which its con- 
structors had foreseen. It is the story of the witch who, by a 
magic incantation, had won the consent of her broomstick to 
go to the river and fill her buckets; having no formula ready 
to check the work, she watched her cave fill with water until 
she was drowned. 

The Prussian army had been organized, brought to per- 
fection, tended with love by the Kings of Prussia, in order 



FRANCE 69 

that it might serve their lust of conquest. To take possession 
of neighbors' territory was then the sole aim; territory was 
almost the whole of the national wealth. But with the nine- 
teenth century there was a new departure. The idea peculiar 
to that century of diverting science to the satisfaction of 
men's material wants evoked a development of industry, 
and consequently of commerce, so extraordinary that the 
old conception of wealth was completely overthrown. Not 
more than fifty years were needed to bring about this 
transformation. On the morrow of the war of 1870 a nation 
expressly made for appropriating the good things of this 
world had no alternative but to become industrial and com- 
mercial. Not on that account, however, would she change 
the essential principle of her action. On the contrary, she 
had but to utilize her habits of discipline, method, tenacity, 
minute care, precise information — and, we may add, of 
impertinence and spying — to which she owed the growth of 
her military power. She would thus equip herself with indus- 
try and commerce not less formidable than her army, and 
able to march, on their part also, in military order. 

From that time onwards these two were seen going for- 
ward together, advancing at an even pace and reciprocally 
supporting each other — industry, which had answered the 
appeal of the spirit of conquest, on one side; on the other, 
the army, in which that spirit was incarnate, with the navy, 
which had just been added to the forces of the army. Indus- 
try was free to develop in all directions; but, from the first, 
war was the end in view. In enormous factories, such as the 
world had never seen, tens of thousands of workmen toiled 
in casting great guns, while by their side, in workshops and 
laboratories, every invention which the disinterested genius 
of neighboring peoples had been able to achieve was imme- 
diately captured, bent from its intended use, and converted 
into an engine of war. Reciprocally, the army and navy 
which owed their growth to the increasing wealth of the 
nation, repaid the debt by placing their services at the 
disposal of this wealth: they undertook to open roads for 
commerce and outlets for industry. But through this very 
combination the movement imposed on Prussia by her 
kings, and on Germany by Prussia, was bound to swerve 
from its course, whilst gathering speed and flinging itself 



70 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

forward. Sooner or later It was bound to escape from all 
control and become a plunge into the abyss. 

For, even though the spirit of conquest knows no limit in 
itself, it must limit its ambitions as long as the question is 
simply that of seizing a neighbor's territory. To constitute 
their kingdom, kings of Prussia had been obliged to under- 
take a long series of wars. Whether the name of the spoiler 
be Frederick or William, not more than one or two provinces 
can be annexed at a time: to take more is to weaken oneself. 
But suppose that the same insatiable thirst for conquest 
enters into the new form of wealth — what follows.^ Boundless 
ambition, which till then had spread out the coming of its 
gains over indefinite time, since each one of them would be 
worth only a definite portion of space, will now leap all at 
once to an object boundless as itself. Rights will be set up on 
every point of the globe where raw material for industry, 
refitting stations for ships, concessions for capitalists, or 
outlets for production are seen to exist. In fact, the policy 
which had served Prussia so well passed at a bound from 
the most calculating prudence to the wildest temerity. 
Bismarck, whose common-sense put some restraint on the 
logic of his principles, was still averse to colonial enterprises; 
he said that all the affairs of the East were not worth the 
bones of one Pomeranian grenadier. But Germany, retaining 
Bismarck's former impulse, went straight on and rushed 
forward along the lines of least resistance to east and west: 
on the one side lay the route to the Orient, on the other the 
empire of the sea. But in so doing she virtually declared war 
on the nations which Bismarck had managed to keep allied 
or friendly. Her ambition looked forward to the domination 
of the world. 

Moreover, there was no moral restraint which could keep 
this ambition under control. Intoxicated by victory, by the 
prestige which victory had given her, and of which her com- 
merce, her industry, her science even, had reaped the benefit, 
Germany plunged into a material prosperity such as she had 
never known, such as she would never have dared to dream 
of. She told herself that if force had wrought this miracle, if 
force had given her riches and honor, it was because force 
had within it a hidden virtue, mysterious — nay, divine. Yes, 
brute force with its train of trickery and lies, when It comes 



FRANCE 71 

with powers of attack sufficient for the conquest of the world, 
must needs be In direct line from heaven and a revelation of 
the will of God on earth. The people to whom this power of 
attack had come were the elect, a chosen race hy whose side 
the others are races of bondmen. To such a race nothing is 
forbidden that may help in establishing Its dominion. Let 
none speak to It of inviolable right! Right is what is written 
in a treaty; a treaty is what registers the will of a con- 
queror — that Is, the direction of his force for the time being: 
force, then, and right are the same thing; and if force is 
pleased to take a new direction, the old right becomes an- 
cient history and the treaty, which backed it with a solemn 
undertaking, no more than a scrap of paper. Thus Germany, 
struck with wonder in presence of her victories, of the brute 
force which had been their means, of the material prosperity 
which was the outcome, translated her amazement into an 
idea. And see how, at the call of this idea, a thousand 
thoughts, as if awaked from slumber, and shaking off the 
dust of libraries, came rushing In from every side — thoughts 
which Germany had suffered to sleep among her poets and 
philosophers, every one which could lend a seductive or 
striking form to a conviction already made! Henceforth 
German imperialism had a theory of Its own. Taught in 
schools and universities. It easily moulded to itself a nation 
already broken-In to passive obedience and having no loftier 
ideal wherewith to oppose the official doctrine. Many per- 
sons have explained the aberrations of German policy as due 
to that theory. For my part, I see in it nothing more than a 
philosophy doomed to translate Into ideas what was, In its 
essence, insatiable ambition and will perverted by pride. 
The doctrine is an effect rather than a cause; and should the 
day come when Germany, conscious of her moral humilia- 
tion, shall say, to excuse herself, that she had trusted herself 
too much to certain theories, that an error of judgment Is 
not a crime. It will then be necessary to remind her that her 
philosophy was simply a translation into intellectual terms of 
her brutality, her appetites, and her vices. So, too, in most 
cases, doctrines are the means by which nations and in- 
dividuals seek to explain what they are and what they do. 
Germany, having finally become a predatory nation, In- 
vokes Hegel as witness; just as a Germany enamored of 



72 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

moral beauty would have declared herself faithful to Kant, 
just as a sentimental Germany would have found her tutelary 
genius In Jacob! or Schopenhauer. Had she leaned in any 
other direction and been unable to find at home the philos- 
ophy she needed, she would have procured it from abroad. 
Thus when she wished to convince herself that predestined 
races exist, she took from France, that she might hoist him 
Into celebrity, a writer whom we have not read — Goblneau. 

None the less Is It true that perverse ambition, once erected 
into theory, feels more at ease in working itself out to the 
end; a part of the responsibility will then be thrown upon 
logic. If the German race is the elect. It will be the only race 
which has an unconditional right to live; the others will be 
tolerated races, and this toleration will be precisely what is 
called "the state of peace." Let war come; the annihilation 
of the enemy will be the end Germany has to pursue. She will 
not strike at combatants only; she will massacre women, 
children, old men; she will pillage and burn; the Ideal will be 
to destroy towns, villages, the whole population. Such is the 
conclusion of the theory. Now we come to Its aim and true 
principle. 

As long as war was no more than a means to the settle- 
ment of a dispute between two nations, the conflict was local- 
ized to the two armies Involved. More and more of useless 
violence was eliminated; Innocent populations were kept 
outside the quarrel. Thus little by little a code of war was 
drawn up. From the first, however, the Prussian army, or- 
ganized as it was for conquest, did not take kindly to this 
law. But from the time when Prussian militarism, now turned 
into German militarism, had become one with Industrialism, 
it was the enemy's Industry, his commerce, the sources of his 
wealth, his wealth Itself, as well as his military power, which 
war must now make the end in view. His factories must be de- 
stroyed that his competition may be suppressed. Moreover, 
that he may be Impoverished once and for all and the aggres- 
sor enriched, his towns must be put to ransom, pillaged, and 
burned. Above all must the war be short, not only In order 
that the economic life of Germany might not suffer too much, 
but further, and chiefly, because her military power lacked 
that consciousness of a right superior to force by which she 
could sustain and recuperate her energies. Her moral force, 



FRANCE 73 

being only the pride which comes from material force, would 
be exposed to the same vicissitudes as this latter: in pro- 
portion as the one was being expended the other would be 
used up. Time for moral force to become used up must not be 
given. The machine must deliver its blow all at once. And 
this it could do by terrorizing the population, and so paralyz- 
ing the nation. To achieve that end, no scruple must be 
suffered to embarrass the play of its wheels. Hence a system 
of atrocities prepared in advance — a system as sagaciously 
put together as the machine itself. 

Such is the explanation of the spectacle before us. "Scien- 
tific barbarism," "systematic barbarism," are phrases we 
have heard. Yes, barbarism reinforced by the capture of 
civilization. Throughout the course of the history we have 
been following there is, as it were, the continuous clang of 
militarism and industrialism, of machinery and mechanism, 
of debased moral materialism. 

Many years hence, when the reaction of the past shall 
have left only the grand outline in view, this perhaps is how 
a philosopher will speak of it. He will say that the idea, pe- 
culiar to the nineteenth century, of employing science in the 
satisfaction of our material wants had given a wholly un- 
foreseen extension to the mechanical arts and had equipped 
man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made 
during the thousands of years he had lived on the earth. 
Each new machine being for man a new organ — an artificial 
organ which merely prolongs the natural organs — his body 
became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without 
his soul being able at the same time to dilate to the dimen- 
sions of his new body. From this disproportion there issued 
the problems, moral, social, international, which most of the 
nations endeavored to solve by filling up the soulless void 
in the body politic by creating more liberty, more fraternity, 
more justice than the world had ever seen. Now, while man- 
kind labored at this task of spiritualization, inferior powers — 
I was going to say infernal powers — plotted an inverse ex- 
perience for mankind. What would happen if the mechanical 
forces, which science had brought to a state of readiness for 
the service of man, should themselves take possession of man 
in order to make his nature material as their own.^ What 
kind of a world would it be if this mechanism should seize 



74 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

the human race entire, and if the peoples, instead of raising 
themselves to a richer and more harmonious diversity, as 
persons may do, were to fall into the uniformity of things? 
What kind of a society would that be which should mechan- 
ically obey a word of command mechanically transmitted; 
which should rule its science and its conscience in accord- 
ance therewith; and which should lose, along with the sense 
of justice, the power to discern between truth and falsehood? 
What would mankind be when brute force should hold the 
place of moral force? What new barbarism, this time final, 
would arise from these conditions to stifle feeling, ideas, and 
the whole civilization of which the old barbarism contained 
the germ? What would happen, in short, if the moral effort 
of humanity should turn in its tracks at the moment of at- 
taining its goal, and if some diabolical contrivance should 
cause it to produce the mechanization of spirit instead of the 
spiritualization of matter? There was a people predestined to 
try the experiment. Prussia had been militarized by her kings; 
Germany had been militarized by Prussia; a powerful nation 
was on the spot marching forward in mechanical order. Ad- 
ministration and military mechanism were only waiting to 
make alliance with industrial mechanism. The combination 
once made, a formidable machine would come into existence. 
A touch upon the starting-gear and the other nations would 
be dragged in the wake of Germany, subjects to the same 
movement, prisoners of the same mechanism. Such would be 
the meaning of the war on the day when Germany should de- 
cide upon its declaration. 

She decided, he will continue, but the result was very 
different from what had been predicted. For the moral forces, 
which were to submit to the forces of matter by their side, 
suddenly revealed themselves as creators of material force. 
A simple idea, the heroic conception which a small people 
had formed of its honor, enabled it to make head against a 
powerful empire. At the cry of outraged justice we saw, more- 
over, in a nation which till then had trusted in its fleet, one 
million, two millions of soldiers suddenly rise from the earth. 
A yet greater miracle: in a nation thought to be mortally 
divided against itself all became brothers in the space of a 
day. From that moment the issue of the conflict was not 
open to doubt. On the one side, there was force spread out 



FRANCE 75 

on the surface; on the other, there was force in the depths. 
On one side, mechanism, the manufactured article which 
cannot repair its own injuries; on the other, Ufe, the power of 
creation which makes and remakes itself at every instant. 
On one side, that which uses itself up; on the other, that 
which does not use itself up. 

Indeed, our philosopher will conclude, the machine did 
use itself up. For a long time it resisted; then it bent; then 
it broke. Alas! it had crushed under it a multitude of our 
children; and over the fate of this young life, which was so 
naturally and purely heroic, our tears will continue to fall. 
An implacable law decrees that spirit must encounter the 
resistance of matter, that life cannot advance without bruis- 
ing that which lives, and that great moral results are pur- 
chased by much blood and by many tears. But this time the 
sacrifice was to be rich in fruit as it had been rich in beauty. 
That the powers of death might be matched against life in 
one supreme combat, destiny had gathered them all at a 
single point. And behold how death was conquered; how 
humanity was saved by material suffering from the moral 
downfall which would have been its end; while the peoples, 
joyful in their desolation, raised on high the song of deliver- 
ance from the depths of ruin and of grief! 



(c) CIVILIZATION VERSUS KULTUR 

ROMAIN ROLLAND: PRO ARTS (October, 1914.) ' 

Among the many crimes of this infamous war which are all 
odious to us, why have we chosen for protest the crimes 
against things and not against men, the destruction of works 
and not of lives .'' 

Many are surprised by this, and have even reproached us 
for it — as^if we have not as much pity as they for the bodies 
and hearts of the thousands of victims who are crucified! 
Yet over the armies which fall, there flies the vision of their 
love, and of la Patrie, to which they sacrifice themselves — 
over these lives which are passing away passes the holy Ark 
of the art and thought of centuries, borne on their shoulders. 

1 Written after the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral. 



76 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

The bearers can change. May the Ark be saved! To the elite 
of the world falls the task of guarding it. And since the 
common treasure is threatened, may they rise to protect it! 

I am glad to think that in the Latin countries this sacred 
duty has always been regarded as paramount. Our France 
which bleeds with so many other wounds, has suffered 
nothing more cruel than the attack against her Parthenon, 
the Cathedral of Rheims, "Our Lady of France." Letters 
which I have received from sorely tried families, and from 
soldiers who for two months have borne every hardship, 
show me (and I am proud of it for them and for my people) 
that there was no burden heavier for them to bear. It is 
because we put spirit above flesh. Very different is the case 
of the German intellectuals, who, to my reproaches for the 
sacrilegious acts of their devastating armies, have all replied 
with one voice, "Perish every chef-d' ceuvre rather than one 
German soldier!" 

A piece of architecture like Rheims is much more than 
one life; it is a people — whose centuries vibrate like sym- 
phony in this organ of stone. It is their memories of joy, of 
glory, and of grief; their meditations, ironies, dreams. It is 
the tree of the race, whose roots plunge to the profoundest 
depths of its soil, and whose branches stretch with a sublime 
elan towards the sky. It is still more: its beauty which soars 
above the struggles of nations is the harmonious response 
made by the human race to the riddle of the world — this 
light of the spirit more necessary to souls than that of the 
sun. 

Whoever destroys this work, murders more than a man; 
he murders the purest soul of a race. His crime is inexpiable, 
and Dante would have it punished with an eternal agony, 
eternally renewed. We who repudiate the vindictive spirit 
of so cruel a genius, do not hold a people responsible for the 
crimes of a few. The drama which unfolds itself before our 
eyes, and whose almost certain denouement will be the 
crushing of the German hegemony, is enough for us. 

What brings it home to us most nearly is that not more 
of those who constitute the moral and intellectual elite of 
Germany — that hundred noble spirits, and those thousands 
of brave hearts of which no great nation was ever destitute — 
not one really suspects the crimes of his Government; the 



FRANCE 



n 



atrocities committed in Flanders, in the north and in the 
east of France during the two or three first weeks of the 
war; or (one can safely wager) the voluntary devastations 
of the towns of Belgium and the ruin of Rheims. If they 
came to look at the reality, I know that many of them would 
weep with grief and shame; and of all the shortcomings of 
Prussian Imperialism, the worst and the vilest is to have 
concealed its crime from its people. For by depriving them 
of the means of protesting against those crimes, it has in- 
volved them forever in the responsibility; it has abused their 
magnificent devotion. The intellectuals, however, are also 
guilty. For if one admits that the brave men, who in every 
country tamely feed upon the news which their papers 
and their leaders give them for nourishment, allow them- 
selves to be duped, one cannot pardon those whose duty 
it is to seek truth in the midst of error, and to know the 
value of interested witnesses and passionate hallucinations. 
Before bursting into the midst of this furious debate upon 
which was staked the destruction of nations and of the treas- 
ures of the spirit, their first duty (a duty of loyalty as much 
as of common sense) should have been to consider the 
problems from both sides. By blind loyalty and culpable 
trustfulness they have rushed head foremost into the net 
which their Imperialism had spread. They believed that 
their first duty was, with their eyes closed, to defend the 
honor of their State against all accusation. They did not see 
that the noblest m-cans of defending it was to disavow its 
faults and to cleanse their country of them. . . . 

I have awaited this virile disavowal from the proudest 
spirits of Germany, a disavowal which would have been 
ennobling instead of humiliating. The letter which I wrote 
to one of them, the day after the brutal voice of Wolff's 
Agency pompously proclaimed that there remained of 
Louvain no more than a heap of ashes, was received by the 
entire elite of Germany in a spirit of enmity. They did not 
understand that I offered them the chance of releasing Ger- 
many from the fetters of those crimes which its Empire 
was forging in its name. What did I ask of them.'* What did 
I ask of you all, finer spirits of Germany.? — to express at 
least a courageous regret for the excesses committed, and 
to dare to remind unbridled power that even the Fatherland 



78 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

cannot save Itself through crime, and that above its rights 
are those of the human spirit. I only asked for one voice — a 
single free voice. . . . None spoke. I heard only the clamor 
of herds, the pack of intellectuals giving tongue on the track 
whereon the hunter loosed them, and that insolent Manifesto, 
in which, without the slightest effort to justify its crimes, 
you have unanimously declared that they do not exist. And 
your theologians, your pastors, your court-preachers, have 
stated further that you are very just and that you thank 
God for having made you thus. . . . Race of Pharisees, what 
chastisement from on high shall scourge your sacrilegious 
pride! . . . Do you not suspect the evil which you have 
done to your own people.'' The megalomania, a menace to 
the world, of an Ostwald or an H. S. Chamberlain,^ the crim- 
inal determination of ninety-three Intellectuals not to wish 
to see the truth, will have cost Germany more than ten de- 
feats. 

How clumsy you are! I believe that of all your faults 
maladresse is the worst. You have not said one word since 
the beginning of this war which has not been more fatal for 
you than all the speeches of your adversaries. It is you who 
have light-heartedly furnished the proof or the argument of 
the worst accusations that have been brought against you; 
just as your official agencies, under the stupid illusion of 
terrorizing us, have been the first to launch emphatic recitals 
of your most sinister devastations. It is you, who when the 
most Impartial of your adversaries were obliged, In fairness, 

* When I wrote this, I had not yet seen the monstrous article by Thomas Mann 
(in the Neue Rundschau of November, 1914), where, in a fit of fury and injured 
pride, he savagely claimed for Germany, as a title to glory, all the crimes of which 
her adversaries accuse her. He dared to write that the present war was a war of 
German Kultur "against Civilization," proclaiming that German thought had 
no other ideal than militarism, and inscribes on his banner the following lines, the 
apology of force oppressing weakness: 

"Denn der Mensch verkumviert itn Frieden, 

MUssige Rich ist das Grab des Muts. 

Das Gesetz ist der Freund des Schwachen, 

Alles will es nur eben machen. 

Mochte gern die Welt verflachen, 

Aber der Krieg Idsst die Kraft erscheinen. . . ." 
(Man deteriorates in peace. Idle rest is the tomb of courage. Law is the friend of the 
weak, it aims at levelling all. The world would like to reduce itself to a level, but war 
brings out strength.) 

Even so a bull in the arena, mad with rage, rushes with lowered head on the 
matador's sword, and impales himself. 



FRANCE 79 

to limit the responsibility of these acts to a few of your leaders 
and armies, have angrily claimed your share. It is you who 
the day after the destruction of Rheims, which, in your 
inmost hearts, should have dismayed the best amongst 
you, have boasted of it in imbecile pride, instead of trying 
to clear yourselves. It is you, wretched creatures, you, rep- 
resentatives of the spirit, who have not ceased to extol force 
and to despise the weak, as if you did not know that the 
wheel of fortune turns, that this force one day will weigh 
afresh upon you, as in past ages, when your great men, 
at least, retained the consolation of not having yielded 
to it the sovereignty of the spirit and the sacred rights of 
Right! . . , What reproaches, what remorse are you heaping 
up for the future, O blind guides — you who are leading into 
the ditch your nation, which follows you like the stumbling 
blind men of Brueghel! 

What poor arguments you have opposed to us for two 
months ! 

1. War is war, say you, that Is to say without common 
measure with the rest of things, above morals and reason 
and all the limits of ordinary life, a kind of supernatural 
state before which one can only bow without discussion; 

2. Germany is Germany, that Is to say without common 
measure with the rest of nations. The laws which apply to 
others do not apply to her, and the rights which she arrogates 
to herself to violate Right appertain to her alone. Thus she 
can, without crime, tear up written promises, betray sworn 
oaths, violate the neutrality of peoples which she has pledged 
herself to defend. But she claims in return the right to find, 
in the nations which she outrages, "chivalrous adversaries," 
and that they should not be so, that they should dare to de- 
fend themselves by all the means and the arms that remain 
to them, she proclaims a crime! . . . 

One recognizes there Indeed the Interested teaching of 
your Prussian masters! Great minds of Germany, I do not 
doubt your sincerity, but you are no longer capable of seeing 
the truth. Prussian Imperialism has crushed down over your 
eyes and conscience. Its spiked helmet. 

'^Necessity knows no law^ . . . Here is the eleventh 
commandment, the message that you bring to the universe 
to-day, sons of Kant! . . . We have heard It more than 



8o WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

once in history: it is the famous doctrine of Public Safety, 
mother of heroisms and crimes. Every nation has recourse 
to it in the hour of danger, but the greatest are those who 
defend against it their immortal soul. Fifteen years have 
passed since the famous trial which saw a single innocent 
man opposed to the force of the State. Fifteen years have 
passed since we French affronted and shattered the idol of 
public safety, when it threatened, as our Peguy says, "the 
eternal safety of France." 

Listen to him, whom you have killed; listen to a hero of 
the French conscience, writers who have the keeping of the 
conscience of Germany. 

''''Our enemies of that time" wrote Charles Peguy, ^^ spoke 
the language of the raison d'Etat, of the temporal safety of the 
people and the race. But we, by a profound Christian move- 
ment, by a revolutionary effort, at unity with traditional Chris- 
tianity, aimed at no less than attaining the heights of sacrifice, 
in our anxiety for the eternal salvation of this people. We did 
not wish to place France in the position of having committed 
the u7ipardonable sin." 

You do not trouble yourselves about that, thinkers of 
Germany. You bravely give your blood to save the mortal 
life, but do not bother about the life eternal. It is a terrible 
moment, I grant. Your fatherland as ours struggles for its 
life, and I understand and admire the ecstasy of sacrifice 
which impels your youth, as ours, to make of its body a 
rampart against death. "To be or not to be," do you say.f* 
No, that is not enough. To be the great Germany, to be 
the great France, worthy of their past, and respecting one 
another even while fighting, that is what I wish. I should 
blush for victory if my France bought it at the price for 
which you will pay for your temporary success. Even while 
the battles are being fought upon the plains of Belgium and 
amongst the chalky slopes of Champagne, another war is 
taking place upon the field of the spirit, and often victory 
below means defeat above. The conquest of Belgium, Ma- 
lines, Louvain, and Rhelms, the carillons of Flanders, will 
sound a sadder knell in your history than the bells of Jena; 
and the conquered Belgians have robbed you of your glory. 
You know it. You are enraged because you know it. What 
is the good of vainly trying to deceive yourselves.? Truth 



FRANCE 8i 

will be clear to you In the end. You have done your best to 
silence her — one day she will speak; she will speak by the 
mouth of one of your own in whom will be awakened the 
conscience of your race. . . . Oh, that he may soon appear 
and that we may hear his voice — the pure and noble voice 
of the redeemer who shall set you free! He who has lived in 
the intimacy of your old Germany, who has clasped her 
hand in the twisted streets of her heroic and sordid past, who 
has caught the breath of her centuries of trials and shames, 
remembers and waits: for he knows that even if she has 
never proved strong enough to bear victory without waver- 
ing, it is in her hours of trouble that she reforms herself, and 
her greatest geniuses are sons of sorrow. 
September, igi^. 



Since these lines were written I have watched the birth 
of the anxiety which little by little Is making its way into 
the consciences of the good people of Germany. First a 
secret doubt, kept under by a stubborn effort to believe the 
bad arguments collected by their Government to oppose it — 
documents fabricated to prove that Belgium had renounced 
her neutrality herself, false allegations (In vain repudiated 
four times by the French Government, by the Commander- 
in-Chief, by the Cardinal and the Archbishop, and by the 
Mayor of Rheims) — accusing the French of using the Cathe- 
dral of Rheims for military purposes. Lacking arguments, 
their system of defense Is at times disconcerting in its naivete. 

"Is It possible," they say, "that we should be accused of 
wishing to destroy artistic monuments, we, the people above 
all others who venerate art, in whom Is instilled this respect 
from infancy, who have the greatest number of text books 
and historical collections of art and the longest list of lectures 
on aesthetics.'' Is It possible to accuse of the most barbarous 
actions the most humane, the most affectionate, and the 
most homely of peoples?" 

The Idea never strikes them that Germany Is not consti- 
tuted by a single race of men, and that besides the obedient 
masses who are born to obey, to respect the law — all the 
laws — there is the race which commands, which believes It- 
self above all laws, and which makes and unmakes them in 



82 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

the name of force and necessity {Not . . .) It Is this evU 
marriage of Idealism and German force which leads to these 
disasters. The Idealism proves to be a woman; a woman 
captive, who like so many worthy German wives, worships 
her lord and master, and refuses even to think that he could 
ever be wrong. 

It Is, however, necessary for the salvation of Germany 
that she should one day countenance the thought of divorce, 
or that the wife should have the courage to make her voice 
heard In the household. I already know several who are 
beginning to champion the rights of the spirit against force. 
Many a German voice has reached us lately in letters pro- 
testing against war and deploring with us the Injustices 
which we deplore. I will not give their names in order not to 
compromise them. Not very long ago I told the "Falr"^ 
which obstructed Paris that It was not France. I say to-day 
to the German Fair, "You are not the true Germany." 
There exists another Germany juster and more humane, 
whose ambition is not to dominate the world by force and 
guile, but to absorb In peace everything great In the thought 
of other races, and In return to reflect the harmony. With 
that Germany there Is no dispute; we are not her enemies, 
we are the enemies of those who have almost succeeded In 
making the world forget that she still lives. 

1 Jean-Christophe, part V, "La Foire sur la Place." In vol. Ill of the English 
version. — Trans. 



IV. THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

The sudden outbreak of the Great War shocked rather than 
excited the British nation. The significant utterances of the 
early months of conflict were mainly set in the tone of sober 
self-questioning which had been struck by Kipling's almost 
prophetic "Recessional" seventeen years before. Particularly 
characteristic is the temperate handling of the moral prob- 
lem, "How Can War Ever Be Right.?" by Sir Gilbert 
Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. Even the 
most striking poems of the period — with the exception of the 
flamboyant verses on "The Day" by Mr. Henry Chappell, 
a railway porter of Bath — are notable, like Kitchener's 
proclamations, for the absence of inflammatory rhetoric. 
The emphasis rests simply upon the duty to be performed, a 
duty requiring equal sacrifices from every class and imposed 
by a love of country almost mystic in its devotion (as in 
Rupert Brooke's well-known sonnet, "The Soldier"). 

The surprisingly immediate and generous acceptance of 
war burdens by the outlying parts of the Empire — even by 
supposedly disaffected regions like South Africa and India — 
early proved to be a fact of tremendous consequence. The 
reasons for this phenomenon, with its moral implications and 
its bearing on the questions of imperial policy, are treated by 
one of the most eminent living historians, A. F. Pollard, 
Professor of English history in London University. 

Long before the physical strife was ended, the thinkers of 
the nation had begun to look beyond military results to the 
problems of economic reconstruction. L. P. Jacks, Principal 
of Manchester College, Oxford, writes with much suggestlve- 
ness of the relation between the forces of Militarism and 
Industrialism; while Arthur Henderson, Member of the 
War Cabinet and leader of the Labor Party, attempts to 
state what Victory really means in terms of human progress. 

The entry of America into the war accentuated British 
interest in the project of an international federation. As early 

83 



84 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

as 191 5, indeed, A. C. Bradley had published a thoughtful 
essay on "International Morality: The United States of 
Europe." However, the speech of Winston Churchill at the 
July 4 celebration of 1918 and Viscount Grey's discussion of 
the League of Nations have special interest as pronounce- 
ments, during the final months of the war, by two directors of 
British policy. 



(a) THE MORAL ISSUES OF WAR 

SIR GILBERT MURRAY: HOW CAN WAR EVER BE 
RIGHT? (September, 1914.) 

I HAVE all my life been an advocate of Peace. I hate war, not 
merely for its own cruelty and folly, but because it is the 
enemy of all the causes that I care for most, of social progress 
and good government and all friendliness and gentleness of 
life, as well as of art and learning and literature. I have 
spoken and presided at more meetings than I can remember 
for peace and arbitration and the promotion of international 
friendship. I opposed the policy of war in South Africa with 
all my energies, and have been either outspokenly hostile or 
inwardly unsympathetic towards almost every war that 
Great Britain has waged in my lifetime. If I may speak more 
personally, there is none of my own work into which I have 
put more intense feeling than into my translation of Eurip- 
ides' "Trojan Women," the first great denunciation of war 
in European literature. I do not regret any word that I have 
spoken or written in the cause of Peace, nor have I changed, 
so far as I know, any opinion that I have previously held 
on this subject. Yet I believe firmly that we were right to 
declare war against Germany on August 4, 1914, and that to 
have remained neutral in that crisis would have been a 
failure in public duty. 

A heavy responsibility — there is no doubt of it — lies upon 
Great Britain. Our allies, France and Russia, Belgium and 
Serbia, had no choice; the war was, in various degrees, 
forced on all of them. We only, after deliberately surveying 
the situation, when Germany would have preferred for the 
moment not to fight us, of our free will declared war. And 
we were right. 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 85 

How can such a thing be? It is easy enough to see that our 
cause is right, and the German cause, by all ordinary human 
standards, desperately wrong. It is hardly possible to study 
the official papers issued by the British, the German, and 
the Russian Governments, without seeing that Germany — ■ 
or some party in Germany — had plotted this war beforehand; 
that she chose a moment when she thought her neighbors 
were at a disadvantage; that she prevented Austria from 
making a settlement even at the last moment; that in order 
to get more quickly at France she violated her treaty with 
Belgium. Evidence too strong to resist seems to show that 
she has carried out the violation with a purposeful cruelty 
that has no parallel in the wars of modern and civilized na- 
tions. Yet some people may still feel gravely doubtful. 
Germany's ill-doing is no reason for us to do likewise. We did 
our best to keep the general peace; there we were right. We 
failed; the German Government made war in spite of us. 
There we were unfortunate. It was a war already on an 
enormous scale, a vast network of calamity ranging over 
five nations; and we decided to make it larger still. There we 
were wrong. Could we not have stood aside, as the United 
States stand, ready to help refugees and sufferers, anxious to 
heal wounds and not make them, watchful for the first 
chance of putting an end to this time of horror.^ 

"Try for a moment," an objector to our policy might say, 
"to realize the extent of suffering involved in one small 
corner of a battlefield. You have seen a man here and there 
badly hurt in an accident; you have seen perhaps a horse 
with its back broken, and you can remember how dreadful 
It seemed to you. In that one corner how many men, how 
many horses, will be lying, hurt far worse and just waiting 
to die.? Indescribable wounds, extreme torment; and all, far 
further than any eye can see, multiplied and multiplied! 
And, for all your righteous indignation against Germany, 
what have these done,? The horses are not to blame for any- 
body's foreign policy. They have only come where their 
masters took them. And the masters themselves . . . ad- 
mitting that certain highly placed Germans, whose names 
we are not sure of, are as wicked as ever you like, these 
soldiers — peasants and working-men and shopkeepers and 
schoolmasters — have really done nothing In particular; at 



86 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

least, perhaps they have now, but they had not up to the 
time when you, seeing they were involved in war and misery 
already, decided to make war on them also and increase 
their sufferings. You say that justice must be done on con- 
spirators and public malefactors. But so far as the rights and 
wrongs of the war go, you are simply condemning innocent 
men, by thousands and thousands, to death, or even to 
mutilation and torture; is that the best way to satisfy your 
sense of justice.? These innocent people, you will say, are 
fighting to protect the guilty parties whom you are deter- 
mined to reach. Well, perhaps, at the end of the war, after 
millions of innocent people have suffered, you may at last, 
if all goes well with your arms, get at the 'guilty parties.' 
You will hold an inquiry, with imperfect evidence and 
biased judges; you will decide — in all likelihood wrongly — 
that a dozen very stupid and obstinate Prussians with long 
titles are the guilty parties, and even then you will not 
know what to do with them. You will probably try, and al- 
most certainly fail, to make them somehow feel ashamed or 
humiliated. It is likely enough that you will merely make 
them into national heroes. 

"And after all, this is assuming quite the best sort of war: 
a war in which one party is wrong and the other right, and 
the right wins. Suppose both are wrong; or suppose the wrong 
party wins.'' It is as likely as not; for, if the right party is 
helped by his good conscience, the wrong has probably taken 
pains to have the odds on his side before he began quarrelling. 
In that case all the wild expenditure of blood and treasure, 
all the immeasurable suffering of innocent individuals and 
dumb animals, all the tears of women and children in the 
background, have taken place not to vindicate the right, 
but to establish the wrong. To do a little evil that great or 
certain good may come is all very well; but to do almost 
infinite evil for a doubtful chance of attaining something 
which half the people concerned may think good and the 
other half think bad, and which in no imaginable case can 
ever be attained in fullness or purity . . . that is neither 
good morals nor good sense. Anybody not in a passion must 
see that It is Insanity." 

I sympathize with every step of this argument; yet I 
think it is wrong. It is judging of the war as a profit-and-loss 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 87 

account, and reckoning, moreover, only the Immediate 
material consequences. It leaves out of sight the cardinal 
fact that In some causes It is better to fight and be broken 
than to yield peacefully; that sometimes the mere act of 
resisting to the death Is In Itself a victory. 

Let us try to understand this. The Greeks who fought and 
died at Thermopylae had no manner of doubt that they were 
right so to fight and die, and all posterity has agreed with 
them. They probably knew they would be defeated. They 
probably expected that, after their defeat, the Persians 
would proceed easily to conquer the rest of Greece, and 
would treat It much more harshly because It had resisted. 
But such considerations did not affect them. They would 
not consent to their country's dishonor. 

Take again a very clear modern case: the fine story of the 
French tourist who was captured, together with a priest and 
some other white people, by Moorish robbers. The Moors 
gave their prisoners the choice either to trample on the 
Cross or to be killed. The Frenchman happened to be a 
Freethinker and an anti-clerical. He disliked Christianity. 
But he was not going to trample on the Cross at the orders of 
a robber. He stuck to his companions and died. 

This sense of honor and the respect for this sense of honor 
are very deep Instincts In the average man. In the United 
States there is a rather specially strong feeling against mix- 
ture of blood, not only with the blood of colored people, but 
with that of the large masses of mankind who are lumped 
together as "dagoes" or "hunkies." Yet I have noticed that 
persons with a dash of Red Indian blood are not ashamed but 
rather proud of it. And if you look for the reason, I suspect it 
lies in the special reputation which the Indian has acquired, 
that he would never consent to be a slave. He preferred to 
fight till he was dead. 

A deal of nonsense, no doubt. Is talked about "honor" 
and "dishonor." They are feelings based on sentiment, not 
on reason; the standards by which they are judged are often 
conventional or shallow, and sometimes utterly false. Yet 
honor and dishonor are real things. I will not try to define 
them; but will only notice that, like religion, their char- 
acteristic is that they admit of no bargaining. Indeed, we 
can almost think of honor as being simply that which a free 



§8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

man values more than life, and dishonor as that which he 
avoids more than suffering or death. And the important 
point for us is that there are such things. 

There are some people, followers of Tolstoy, who accept 
this position so far as dying is concerned, but will have 
nothing to do with killing. Passive resistance, they say, is 
right; martyrdom is right; but to resist violence by violence 
is sin. 

I was once walking with a friend and disciple of Tolstoy's 
in a country lane, and a little girl was running in front of us. 
I put to him the well-known question: "Suppose you saw a 
man, wicked or drunk or mad, run out and attack that child. 
You are a big man and carry a big stick: would you not stop 
him and, if necessary, knock him down.'"' "No," he said, 
"why should I commit a sin.'' I would try to persuade him, 
I would stand in his way, I would let him kill me, but I 
would not strike him." Some few people will always be found, 
less than one in a thousand, to take this view. They will say: 
"Let the little girl be killed or carried off; let the wicked 
man commit another wickedness; I, at any rate, will not add 
to the mass of useless violence that I see all round me." 

With such persons one cannot reason, though one can often 
respect them. Nearly every normal man will feel that the 
real sin, the real dishonor, lies in allowing an abominable 
act to be committed under your eyes while you have the 
strength to prevent it. And the stronger you are, the greater 
your chance of success, by so much the more are you bound 
to intervene. If the robbers are overpoweringly strong and 
there is no chance of beating or bafffing them, then and only 
then should you think of martyrdom. Martyrdom is not the 
best possibility. It is almost the worst. It is a counsel of de- 
spair, the last resort when there is no hope of successful re- 
sistance. The best thing — suppose once the robbers are there 
and intent on crime — the best thing is to overawe them at 
once; the next best, to defeat them after a hard struggle; 
the third best, to resist vainly and be martyred; the worst 
of all, the one evil that need never be endured, is to let them 
have their will without protest. (As for converting them from 
their evil ways, that is a process which may be hoped for 
afterwards.) 

We have noticed that in all these cases of honor there is, 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 89 

or at least there seems to be, no counting of cost, no balanc- 
ing of good and evil. In ordinary conduct, we are always 
balancing the probable results of this course or that; but 
when honor or religion comes on the scene all such balancing 
ceases. If you argued to the Christian martyr: "Suppose 
you do burn the pinch of incense, what will be the harm.'' All 
your friends know you are really a Christian: they will not 
be misled. The idol will not be any the better for the incense, 
nor will your own true God be any the worse. Why should 
you bring misery on yourself and all your family .f"' Or sup- 
pose you pleaded, with the French atheist: "Why in the 
world should you not trample on the Cross .f* It is the sign 
of the clericalism to which you object. Even if trampling 
somewhat exaggerates your sentiments, the harm is small. 
Who will be a penny the worse for your trampling.^ While you 
will live instead of dying, and all your family be happy in- 
stead of wretched." Suppose you said to the Red Indian: 
"My friend, you are outnumbered by ten to one. If you will 
submit unconditionally to these pale-faces, and be always 
civil and obliging, they will probably treat you quite well. If 
they do not, well, you can reconsider the situation later on. 
No need to get yourself killed at once." 

The people concerned would not condescend to meet your 
arguments. Perhaps they can be met, perhaps not. But it is 
in the very essence of religion or honor that it must out- 
weigh all material considerations. The point of honor is the 
point at which a man says to some proposal, " I will not do it. 
I will rather die." 

These things are far easier to see where one man is involved 
than where it is a whole nation. But they arise with nations 
too. In the case of a nation the material consequences are 
much larger, and the point of honor is apt to be less clear. 
But, in general, whenever one nation in dealing with another 
relies simply on force or fraud, and denies to its neighbor the 
common consideration due to human beings, a point of 
honor must arise. 

Austria says suddenly to Serbia: "You are a wicked little 
State. I have annexed and governed against their will some 
millions of your countrymen, yet you are still full of anti- 
Austrian feeling, which I do not intend to allow. You will 
dismiss from your service all officials, politicians, and soldiers 



90 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

who do not love Austria, and I will further send you from 
time to time lists of persons whom you are to dismiss or put 
to death. And if you do not agree to this within forty-eight 
hours, I, being vastly stronger than you, will make you." As 
a matter of fact, Serbia did her very best to comply with 
Austria's demands; she accepted about two-thirds of them, 
and asked for arbitration on the remaining third. But it is 
clear that she could not accept them all without being dis- 
honored. That is, Serbia would have given up her freedom 
at the threat of force; the Serbs would no longer be a free 
people, and every individual Serb would have been humili- 
ated. He would have confessed himself to be the kind of man 
who will yield when an Austrian bullies him. And if it is 
urged that under good Austrian government Serbia would 
become richer and safer, and the Serbian peasants get better 
markets, such pleas cannot be listened to. They are a price 
offered for slavery; and a free man will not accept slavery at 
any price. 

Germany, again, says to Belgium (we leave out for the 
moment the fact of Germany's special treaty obligations), 
"We have no quarrel with you, but we intend for certain 
reasons to march across your territory and perhaps fight a 
battle or two there. We know that you are pledged by treaty 
not to allow any such thing, but we cannot help that. Con- 
sent, and we will pay you some compensation afterwards; 
refuse, and we shall make you wish you had never been 
born." At that moment Belgium was a free self-governing 
State. If she had yielded to Germany's demand, she would 
have ceased to be either. It is possible that, if Germany had 
been completely victorious and France quite unable to re- 
taliate, Belgium would have suffered no great material in- 
jury; but she would have taken orders from a stranger who 
had no right to give them, simply because he was strong and 
Belgium dared not face him. Belgium refused. She has had 
some of her principal towns destroyed, some thousands of her 
soldiers killed, many more thousands of her women, children, 
and non-combatants outraged and beggared; but she is still 
free. She has still her honor. 

Let us think this matter out more closely. Our Tolstoyan 
will say: "We speak of Belgium's honor and Serbia's honor; 
but who is Serbia and who is Belgium? There is no such per- 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 91 

son as either. There are only great numbers of people who 
happen to be Serbians and Belgians, and who mostly have 
had nothing to do with the questions at issue. Some of them 
are honorable people, some dishonorable. The honor of each 
one of them depends very much on whether he pays his 
debts and tells the truth, but not in the least on whether a 
number of foreigners walk through his country or interfere 
with his Government. King Albert and his Ministers might 
feel humiliated if the German Government compelled them 
to give way against their will; but would the ordinary popu- 
lation.'' Would the ordinary peasant or shopkeeper or artisan 
In the districts of Vise and Liege and Louvain have felt par- 
ticularly disgraced or ashamed.^ He would probably have 
made a little money and been greatly amused by the sight 
of the troops passing. Who will pretend that he would have 
suffered any injury that can for a moment be compared with 
what he has suffered now, in order that his Government may 
feel proud of itself.'"' 

I will not raise the point that, as a matter of fact, to grant 
a right of way to Germany would have been equivalent to 
declaring war against France, so that Belgium would not, 
by giving up her independence, have been spared the danger 
of war. I will assume that nothing but honor was Involved. 
In that form, this question goes to the root of our whole 
conception of citizenship and the position of man In society. 
And I believe that our Tolstoyan friend Is profoundly 
wrong. 

Is it true, In a healthy and well-governed State, that the 
average citizen Is Indifferent to the honor of his country.'* 
We know that It Is not. True, the average citizen may often 
not understand what is going on, but as soon as he knows he 
cares. Suppose for a moment that the King, or the Prime 
Minister, or the President of the United States, were found 
to be In the pay of a foreign State, as for instance Charles II 
was In the pay of Louis XIV, can any one pretend that the 
ordinary citizens of Great Britain or America would take it 
quietly.'* that any normal man would be found saying: "Well, 
the King, or the President, or the Prime Minister, is behav- 
ing dishonorably, but that Is a matter for him, not for me. 
I am an honest and honorable man, and my Government can 
do what it likes." The notion Is absurd. The ordinary citi- 



92 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

zen would feel Instantly and without question that his coun- 
try's honor involved his own. And woe to the society in 
which it were otherwise! We know of such societies In his- 
tory. They are the kind which Is called "corrupt," and which 
generally has not long to live. Belgium has proved that she Is 
not that kind of society. 

But what about Great Britain herself.'' At the present 
moment a very clear case has arisen, and we can test our 
own feelings. Great Britain had, by a solemn treaty more 
than once renewed, pledged herself to maintain the neu- 
trality of Belgium. Belgium Is a little State lying between 
two very strong States, France and Germany, and In danger 
of being overrun or maltreated by one of them unless the 
Great Powers guarantee her safety. The treaty, signed by 
Prussia, Russia, Austria, France, and Great Britain, bound 
all these Powers not to attack Belgium, move troops into her 
territory, or annex any part of it; and further, to resist by 
armed force any Power which should try to do any of these 
things. Belgium, on her part, was bound to maintain her own 
neutrality to the best of her power, and not to side with any 
State which was at war with another. 

At the end of last July the exact case arose in which we 
had pledged ourselves to act. Germany suddenly and with- 
out excuse invaded Belgium, and Belgium appealed to us 
and France to defend her. Adeantlme she fought alone, 
desperately, against overwhelming odds. The issue was 
clear, and free from any complications. The German Chan- 
cellor, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, in his speech of Au- 
gust 6, admitted that Germany had no grievance against 
Belgium, and no excuse except "necessity." She could not 
get to France quick enough by the direct road. Germany 
put her case to us, roughly, on these grounds. "True, you 
did sign a treaty, but what Is a treaty .f* We ourselves signed 
the same treaty, and see what we are doing! Anyhow, treaty 
or no treaty, we have Belgium absolutely in our power. If 
she had done what we wanted, we would have treated her 
kindly; as it is we shall show her no mercy. If you will now 
do what we want and stay quiet, later on, at our convenience, 
we will consider a friendly deal with you. If you interfere, 
you must take the consequences. We trust you will not be so 
insane as to plunge your whole Empire into danger for the 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE ' 93 

sake of a 'scrap of paper.'" Our answer was: "Evacuate 
Belgium within twelve hours or we fight you." 

I think that answer was right. Consider the situation 
carefully. No question arises of overhaste or lack of patience 
on our part. From the first moment of the crisis, we had 
labored night and day in every Court of Europe for any 
possible means of conciliation and peace. We had carefully 
and sincerely explained to Germany beforehand what 
attitude she might expect from us. We did not send our 
ultimatum till Belgium was already invaded. It is just the 
plain question put to the British Government, and, I think, 
to every one who feels himself a British citizen: "The exact 
case contemplated in your treaty has arisen: the people you 
swore to protect is being massacred; will you keep your word 
at a gigantic cost, or will you break it at the bidding of 
Germany.^" For my own part, weighing the whole question 
soberly and without undue passion, I feel that in this case 
I would rather die than submit; and I believe that the Gov- 
ernment, in deciding to keep its word at the cost of war, has 
rightly Interpreted the feeling of the average British citizen. 

So much for the question of honor, pure and simple; 
honor without regard for consequences. But, of course, situ- 
ations in real political life are never so simple as that; they 
have many different aspects and ramifications. And in the 
present case, though the point of honor happens to be quite 
clear, It seems probable that even without it there were com- 
pelling reasons for war. I do not, of course, for a moment 
mean that war was going to be "profitable" to Great 
Britain; such a calculation would be infamous. I mean that, 
terrible as the consequences of our taking part in the war 
were sure to be, the consequences of our not doing so were 
likely to be even more profoundly and widely evil. 

Let us leave aside, then, the definite treaty binding us to 
Belgium. Apart from that, we were faced with a complicated 
question of statesmanship, of prudence, of patriotism towards 
our own country and towards humanity. 

Germany has for years presented a problem to Europe. 
Since her defeat of France in 1870, she has been extraordi- 
narily successful, and the success seems to have intoxicated 
her. This is a complicated subject, which calls for far deeper 
knowledge than I possess. I will merely try to state, as fairly 



94 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

as I can, the impression that has been forced on me by a 
certain amount of reading and observation. From the point 
of view of one who really believes that great nations ought 
to behave to one another as scrupulously and honorably as 
ordinary, law-abiding men, no Power in Europe, or out of 
it, is quite blameless. They all have ambitions; they all, to 
some extent, use spies; they all, within limits, try to outwit 
each other; in their diplomatic dealings they rely not only 
on the claims of good sense and justice, but ultimately, no 
doubt, on the threat of possible force. But, as a matter of 
degree, Germany does all these things more than other 
Powers. In her diplomacy, force comes at once to the front; 
international justice is hardly mentioned. She spends colossal 
sums on her secret service, so that German spies are become 
a by-word and a joke. In the recognized sport of international 
treachery, she goes frequently beyond the rules of the game. 
Her Emperor, her Imperial Chancellor, and other people 
in the highest positions of responsibility, expound her ambi- 
tions and her schemes in language which would only be used 
by an irresponsible journalist in England or France. They 
discuss, for instance, whether the time has come for conquer- 
ing France once more, and how best they can " bleed her 
white" and reduce her to impotence. They explain that Bis- 
marck and his generation have made Germany the strongest 
Power on the Continent. "The will of Germany is now re- 
spected" in Europe; it rests with the present Emperor to 
make it similarly respected throughout the world. "Ger- 
many's world-future lies on the sea." They discuss whether 
they can build up a fleet strong enough to fight and beat the 
British fleet without Great Britain interfering. They discuss 
in public how many colonies, and which, they will leave to 
Great Britain when the great "Day" comes. They express 
regret, combined, so far as one can make out, with a little 
genuine surprise, that the ''brutal egoism of Great Britain" 
should raise any objection to this plan and they hope — 
openly and publicly — that her well-known weakness and 
cowardice will make her afraid to act. Since Great Britain 
has a vast number of Mohammedan subjects, who may 
possibly be stirred to disaffection, the German Emperor 
proclaims to "the three hundred million Mohammedans 
who live scattered over the globe" that whenever they need 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 95 

him, the German Emperor will be their friend. And this in 
1898, in the middle of profound peace! Professors in German 
Universities lecture on the best way of destroying the British 
Empire, and the officers' messes in the German Navy reg- 
ularly drink the toast of "The Day." There is no need to 
explain what Day. The curious thing is that these plans are 
all expounded in public speeches and books — strange books, 
in which the average civilized sense of international justice 
or common honesty seems to have been left out of account, 
as well as the sense of common political prudence; in which 
the schemes of an accomplished burglar are expounded with 
the candor of a child. 

And all through this period, In which she plots against her 
neighbors and tells them she is plotting, Germany lives in a 
state of alarm. Her neighbors are so unfriendly! Their atti- 
tude may be correct, but it is not trustful and cordial. The 
Imperial Chancellor, Von Biilow, explains In his book that 
there was only one time when he really breathed freely. It 
was In 1909, when Austria, his ally, annexed by violence and 
against her pledges the two Slav provinces of Bosnia and 
Herzegovina. All Europe was indignant, especially Russia, 
the natural protector of the Slavs, and England, the habitual 
champion of small nationalities. But Germany put down her 
foot. The Kaiser "appeared in shining armor beside his 
ally," and no Power dared to Intervene. Germany was In the 
wrong. Every one knew she was in the wrong. It was just 
that fact that was so comforting. Her army was big enough, 
her navy was big enough, and for the moment the timid 
creature felt secure. 

Lastly, we must remember that It Is Germany who started 
the race for armaments; and that while Russia has pressed 
again and again for a general limitation of armies, and Eng- 
land made proposal after proposal for a general limitation of 
navies, Germany has steadily refused to entertain any such 
idea. 

Now, for some time it was possible to minimize all these 
danger-signals, and, for my own part, I have always tried to 
minimize them. There are militarists and Jingoes in every 
country; our own have often been bad enough. The German 
sort seemed unusually blatant, but It did not follow that they 
carried their country with them. The Kaiser, always impul- 



96 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

sive, said on the whole more friendly things than unfriendly 
things. At any rate, it seemed wiser and more statesmanlike 
to meet provocation with good temper, and to try by per- 
sistent friendliness to encourage all the more liberal and 
reasonable elements in German public life. This policy 
seemed possible until the July of the present year. Then 
certain facts were forced upon us. They are all detailed in 
the White Paper and the other diplomatic correspondence. 
We suddenly found that Germany and Austria, or some 
conspiring parties in Germany and Austria, had arranged for 
a great stroke, like that of 1909 on a larger scale. It was so 
obviously aggressive in its nature that their ally, Italy, the 
third Power in the Triple Alliance, formally refused to act 
with them. The Alliance only applied to a defensive war. 
The time had been carefully chosen. England was supposed 
to be on the verge of a civil war in Ireland and a new mutiny 
in India. France had just been through a military scandal, in 
which it appeared that the army was short of boots and 
ammunition. Russia, besides a general strike and internal 
troubles, was re-arming her troops with a new weapon, and 
the process was only half through. Even the day was chosen. 
It was in a week when nearly all the ambassadors were away 
from their posts, taking their summer holiday — the English 
Ambassador at Berlin, the Russian Ambassadors at Berlin 
and Vienna, the Austrian Foreign Minister, the French 
Prime Minister, the Serbian Prime Minister, the Kaiser 
himself, and others who might have used a restraining in- 
fluence on the schemes of the war party. Suddenly, without a 
word to any outside Power, Austria issued an ultimatum 
to Serbia, to be answered in forty-eight hours. Seventeen 
of these hours had elapsed before the other Powers were 
informed, and war was declared on Serbia before all the 
ambassadors could get back to their posts. The leading 
statesmen of Europe sat up all night trying for conciliation, 
for arbitration, even for bare delay. At the last moment, 
when the Austrian Foreign Minister had returned, and had 
consented to a basis for conversations with Russia, there 
seemed to be a good chance that peace might be preserved; 
but at that moment Germany launched her ultimatum at 
Russia and France, and Austria was already Invading Serbia. 
In twenty-four hours, six European Powers were at war. 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 97 

Now, the secret history of this strange intrigue is not 
yet known. It will not be known for fifty years or so. It is 
impossible to believe that the German nation would have 
backed up the plot, if they had understood It. It is difficult 
to think that the Kaiser would; and the Austrian Foreign 
Minister, when once he returned, tried to undo the work of 
his subordinates. But somehow the war parties in Germany 
and Austria got the upper hand for one fatal week, and have 
managed to drag their countries after them. 

We saw, as Italy had seen, that Germany had prearranged 
the war. We saw her breaking her treaties and overrunning 
little Belgium, as her ally was trampling on little Serbia. 
We remembered her threats against ourselves. And at this 
very time, as if to deepen our suspicions, she made us what 
has been justly termed an "infamous proposal," that if we 
would condone her treaty-breaking now, she would have an 
*' understanding" with us afterwards. 

Suppose we had not been bound by our treaty to Belgium, 
or even our natural and Informal friendship with France: 
what could we have done.^ I wish to take no low ground; I 
wish to face the question from the point of view of a states- 
man who owes a duty to his own country and a duty to 
Europe. 

The one thing which we could not have done, in my 
opinion, was to repudiate our responsibility. We are a very 
strong Power, one of the strongest In the world, and here, 
under our eyes and within range of our guns, a thing was 
being done which menaced every living creature In Europe. 
The one thing that no statesman could possibly do was to 
say: "This is no concern of ours. We will go our ways as 
usual." It was perfectly possible to stand aside and pro- 
claim our neutrality. But — apart from questions of honor — 
to proclaim neutrality was quite as grave a step as to pro- 
claim war. Let no man imagine that he can escape blood- 
guiltiness by standing still while murder is committed before 
his eyes. 

I will not argue here what the right decision would have 
been. It depends, unlike the point of honor, on a careful 
balancing of evidence and consequences, and scarcely any- 
one in the country except the Government has sufficient 
knowledge to make the balance. For my own part, I should 



98 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

have started with a strong predilection for peace, even a 
fragmentary peace, but should ultimately have been guided 
chiefly by the public men whom I most trust. But, as things 
fell out, our Government was not forced to make a decision 
on this difficult ground at all, because Germany took a 
further step which made the whole situation clear. Her 
treatment of Belgium not only roused our passionate in- 
dignation, but compelled us either to declare war or to break 
our pledged word. I incline, however, to think that our whole 
welfare is so vitally dependent on the observance of public 
law and the rights of nations, and would have been so 
terribly endangered by the presence of Germany in a con- 
queror's mood at Ostend and Zeebrugge, not to speak_ of 
Dunkirk and Calais, that in this case mere self-preservation 
called us to fight. I do not venture to lay any stress on the 
hopes which we may entertain for the building up of a better 
Europe after the war, a Europe which shall have settled its 
old feuds and devised some great machinery for dealing with 
new difficulties as they arise, on a basis of justice and con- 
cord, not of Intrigue and force. By all means let us hope, let 
us work, for that rebuilding; but It will be a task essentially 
difficult when It comes; and the very beginning of It lies far 
away, separated from the present time and the Immediate 
task by many terrific hazards. We have no right to soothe 
our consciences concerning the war with professions of the 
fine and generous things that we are going to do afterwards. 
Doubtless Germany was going to make us all good and 
happy when she was once sure of our obedience. For the 
moment we can think only of our duty, and need of self- 
preservation. And I believe that In this matter the two run 
together: our interest coincides with our honor. 

It Is curious how often this is the case. It Is one of the old 
optimistic beliefs of nineteenth-century Liberalism, and one 
which is often ridiculed, that a nation's duty generally does 
coincide with Its interest. No doubt one can find abundant 
exceptions, but I believe that in the main, for nations as 
for individuals, real palpable conscious dishonesty or wicked- 
ness is exceedingly unprofitable. This is a more interesting 
fact than It looks at first sight. 

There are many poisons which are simply so nasty that, 
undisguised, they cannot be swallowed. No power could 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 99 

induce a man or dog to sip or lap a tablespoonful of nicotine 
or prussic acid. You might coax the dog with future bones, 
you might persuade the man that the medicine was just 
what his health needed; but their swallowing muscles would 
refuse to act. Doubtless, in the scheme of nature, the dis- 
gust is a provision which saves the race. Now I cannot help 
suspecting that, much more faintly and more fallibly, the 
vehement and invincible refusal with which man's sense of 
honor or religion meets certain classes of proposal, which 
look profitable enough on the surface, is just such another 
warning of nature against poison. In all these cases discussed 
above, the Christian's martyrdom, the honorable man's 
refusal to desert his companions, it was not true to say, as 
we seemed to say, that advantage was on one side and honor 
on the other. Dishonor would have brought with it a subtler 
and more lasting disadvantage, greater in its sum than 
immediate death. If the Christian had sacrificed to the 
idol, what would his life have been afterwards .f* Perhaps his 
friends would have rejected his example and been martyred; 
he would be alone in his shame. Perhaps they would have 
followed his example, and through him the whole band of the 
"faithful" have betrayed Christ. Not a very enviable choice 
either way. Without any tall talk or high professions, would 
it not quite certainly be better for the whole Church and 
probably for the man himself that he should defy his per- 
secutors and die.? And does not the same now hold for any 
patriotic Belgian or Serbian who has had a voice in his 
country's action.'' The choice was not on the one hand honor 
and misery, on the other dishonor and a happy life. It was 
on the one hand honor and great physical suffering, on the 
other hand dishonor and a life subtly affected by that dis- 
honor in a thousand unforeseen ways. I do not underrate the 
tremendous importance of mere physical suffering; I do not 
underrate the advantage of living as long a life as is con- 
veniently possible. But men must die some time, and, if we 
dare really to confess the truth, the thing that most of us 
in our hearts long for, the thing which either means ultimate 
happiness or else is greater and dearer to men than happiness, 
is the power to do our duty and, when we die, to have done 
it. The behavior of our soldiers and sailors proves it. " The 
last I saw of him was on the after bridge^ doing well.'' The words 



loo WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

come in the official report made by the captain of one of our 
lost cruisers. But that is the kind of epitaph nearly all men 
crave for themselves, and the wisest men, I think, even for 
their nation. 

And if we accept this there will follow further conse- 
quences. War is not all evil. It is a true tragedy, which must 
have nobleness and triumph in it as well as disaster. . . . 
This is dangerous ground. The subject lends itself to foolish 
bombast, especially when accompanied by a lack of true 
imagination. We must not begin to praise war without 
stopping to reflect on the hundreds of thousands of human 
beings involved in such horrors of pain and indignity that, 
if here in our ordinary hours we saw one man so treated, 
the memory would sicken us to the end of our lives; we must 
remember the horses, remember the gentle natures brutal- 
ized by hardship and filth, and the once decent persons 
transformed by rage and fear into devils of cruelty. But, 
when we have realized that, we may venture to see in this 
wilderness of evil some oases of extraordinary good. 

These men who are engaged in what seems like a vast 
public crime ought, one would think, to fall to something 
below their average selves, below the ordinary standard 
of common folk. But do they.? Day after day come streams 
of letters from the front, odd stories, fragments of diaries, 
and the like, full of the small, intimate facts which reveal 
character; and almost with one accord they show that these 
men have not fallen, but risen. No doubt there has been 
some selection in the letters; to some extent the writers 
repeat what they wish to have remembered, and say nothing 
of what they wish to forget. But, when all allowances are 
made, one cannot read the letters and the dispatches without 
a feeling of almost passionate admiration for the men about 
whom they tell. They were not originally a set of men chosen 
for their peculiar qualities. They were just our ordinary 
fellow citizens, the men you meet on a crowded pavement. 
There was nothing to suggest that their conduct in common 
life was better than that of their neighbors. Yet now, under 
the stress of war, having a duty before them that is clear 
and unquestioned and terrible, they are daily doing nobler 
things than we most of us have ever had the chance of doing, 
things which we hardly dare hope that we might be able to 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE loi 

do. I am not thinking of the rare achievements that win a 
V. C. or a Cross of the Legion of Honor, but of the common 
necessary heroism of the average men: the long endurance, 
the devoted obedience, the close-banded life in which self- 
sacrifice is the normal rule, and all men may be forgiven 
except the man who saves himself at the expense of his 
comrade. I think of the men who share their last biscuits 
with a starving peasant, who help wounded comrades 
through days and nights of horrible retreat, who give their 
lives to save mates or officers. Or I think again of the ex- 
pressions on faces that I have seen or read about, something 
alert and glad and self-respecting in the eyes of those who 
are going to the front, and even of the wounded who are 
returning. "Never once," writes one correspondent, "not 
once since I came to France have I seen among the soldiers 
an angry face or heard an angry word. . . . They are always 
quiet, orderly, and wonderfully cheerful." And no one who 
has followed the war need be told of their heroism. I do not 
forget the thousands left on the battlefield to die, or the 
groaning of the wounded sounding all day between the 
crashes of the guns. But there is a strange deep gladness as 
well. "One feels an extraordinary freedom," says a young 
Russian officer, "in the midst of death, with the bullets 
whistling round. The same with all the soldiers. The wounded 
all want to get well and return to the fight. They fight with 
tears of joy in their eyes." 

Human nature is a mysterious thing, and man finds his 
weal and woe not in the obvious places. To have something 
before you, clearly seen, which you know you must do, and 
can do, and will spend your utmost strength and perhaps 
your life in doing, that is one form at least of very high 
happiness, and one that appeals — the facts prove it — not 
only to saints and heroes, but to average men. Doubtless 
the few who are wise enough and have enough imagination 
may find opportunity for that same happiness in everyday 
life, but in war ordinary men find it. This is the inward 
triumph which lies at the heart of the great tragedy. 



I02 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 



(b) "ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO DO 
HIS DUTY" 

WINIFRED M. LETTS: THE SPIRES OF OXFORD (SEEN 
FROM A TRAIN) 

I SAW the spires of Oxford 

As I was passing by, 
The gray spires of Oxford 

Against a pearl-gray sky; 
My heart was with the Oxford men 

Who went abroad to die. 

The years go fast in Oxford, 

The golden years and gay; 
The hoary colleges look down 

On careless boys at play, 
But when the bugles sounded — war! 

They put their games away. 

They left the peaceful river, 

The cricket field, the quad, 
The shaven lawns of Oxford 

To seek a bloody sod. 
They gave their merry youth away 

For country and for God. 

God rest you, happy gentlemen. 
Who laid your good lives down, 

Who took the khaki and the gun 
Instead of cap and gown. 

God bring you to a fairer place 
Than even Oxford town. 

W. W. GIBSON: BETWEEN THE LINES (1916) 

When consciousness came back, he found he lay 
Between the opposing fires, but could not tell 
On which hand were his friends; and either way 
For him to turn was chancy — bullet and shell 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 103 

Whistling and shrieking over him, as the glare 

Of searchlights scoured the darkness to blind day. 

He scrambled to his hands and knees ascare, 

Dragging his wounded foot through puddled clay, 

And tumbled in a hole a shell had scooped 

At random in a turnip-field between 

The unseen trenches where the foes lay cooped 

Through that unending battle of unseen, 

Dead-locked, league-stretching armies; and quite spent 

He rolled upon his back within the pit. 

And lay secure, thinking of all it nieant — 

His lying in that little hole, sore hit. 

But living, while across the starry sky 

Shrapnel and shell went screeching overhead— 

Of all it meant that he, Tom Dodd, should lie 

Among the Belgian turnips, while his bed .^ . . 

If it were he, indeed, who'd climbed each night. 

Fagged with the day's work, up the narrow stair, 

And slipt his clothes off in the candle-light. 

Too tired to fold them neatly in a chair 

The way his mother'd taught him — too dog-tired 

After the long day's serving in the shop, 

Inquiring what each customer required, 

Politely talking weather, fit to drop . . . 

And now for fourteen days and nights, at least, 
He hadn't had his clothes off, and had lain • 

In muddy trenches, napping like a beast 
With one eye open, under sun and rain 
And that unceasing hell-fire . . . 

It was strange 
How things turned out — the chances! You'd just got 
To take your luck In life, you couldn't change 
Your luck. 

And so here he was lying shot 
Who just six months ago had thought to spend 
His days behind a counter. Still, perhaps . . . 
And now, God only knew how he would end 1 

He'd like to know how many of the chaps 
Had won back to the trench alive, when he 



104 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Had fallen wounded and been left for dead, 
If any! . . . 

This was different, certainly. 
From selling knots of tape and reels of thread 
And knots of tape and reels of thread and knots 
Of tape and reels of thread and knots of tape. 
Day in, day out, and answering "Have you got" 's 
And "Do you keep" 's till there seemed no escape 
From everlasting serving in a shop. 
Inquiring what each customer required, 
Politely talking weather, fit to drop, 
With swollen ankles, tired . . . 

But he was tired 
Now. Every bone was aching, and had ached 
For fourteen days and nights in that wet trench — 
Just duller when he slept than when he waked — 
Crouching for shelter from the steady drench 
Of shell and shrapnel . . . 

That old trench, it seemed 
Almost like home to him. He'd slept and fed 
And sung and smoked in it, while shrapnel screamed 
And shells went whining harmless overhead — 
Harmless, at least, as far as he . . . 

But Dick- 
Dick hadn't found them harmless yesterday. 
At breakfast, when he'd said he couldn't stick 
Eating dry bread, and crawled out the back way 
And brought them butter in a lordly dish — 
Butter enough for all, and held it high. 
Yellow and fresh and clean as you would wish — 
When plump upon the plate from out the sky 
A shell fell bursting . . . Where the butter went, 
God only knew! . . . 

And Dick ... He dared not think 
Of what had come to Dick ... or what it meant — 
The shrieking and the whistling and the stink 
He'd lived in fourteen days and nights. 'Twas luck 
That he still lived . . . And queer how little then 
He seemed to care that Dick . . . perhaps 'twas pluck 
That hardened him — a man among the men — 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 105 

Perhaps . . . Yet, only think things out a bit, 

And he was rabbit-hvered, blue with funk! 

And he'd Hked Dick . . . and yet when Dick was hit, 

He hadn't turned a hair. The meanest skunk 

He should have thought would feel it when his mate 

Was blown to smithereens — Dick, proud as punch. 

Grinning like sin, and holding up the plate — 

But he had gone on munching his dry hunch. 

Unwinking, till he swallowed the last crumb. 

Perhaps 'twas just because he dared not let 

His mind run upon Dick, who'd been his chum. 

He dared not now, though he could not forget. 

Dick took his luck. And life or death, 'twas luck 
From first to last; and you'd just got to trust 
Your luck and grin. It wasn't so much pluck 
As knowing that you'd got to, when needs must. 
And better to die grinning. . . . 

Quiet now 
Had fallen on the night. On either hand 
The guns were quiet. Cool upon his brow 
The quiet darkness brooded, as he scanned 
The starry sky. He'd never seen before 
So many stars. Although, of course, he'd known 
That there were stars, somehow before the war 
He'd never realized them — so thick-sown. 
Millions and millions. Serving in the shop. 
Stars didn't count for much; and then at nights 
Strolling the pavements, dull and lit to drop. 
You didn't see much but the city lights. 
He'd never in his life seen so much sky 
As he'd seen this last fortnight. It was queer 
The things war taught you. He'd a mind to try 
To count the stars — they shone so bright and clear. 

One, two, three, four . . . Ah, God, but he was tired . . „ 
Five, six, seven, eight . . . 

Yes, it was number eight. 
And what was the next thing that she required.^ 
(Too bad of customers to come so late, 



io6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

At closing time!) Again within the shop 

He handled knots of tape and reels of thread, 

Politely talking weather, fit to drop . . . 

When once again the whole sky overhead 

Flared blind with searchlights, and the shriek of shell 

And scream of shrapnel roused him. Drowsily 

He stared about him, wondering. Then he fell 

Into deep dreamless slumber. 



He could see 
Two dark eyes peeping at him, ere he knew 
He was awake, and it again was day — 
An August morning, burning to clear blue. 
The frightened rabbit scuttled . . . 

Far away, 
A sound of firing . . . Up there, in the sky 
Big dragon-flies hung hovering . . . Snowballs burst 
About them . . . Flies and snowballs. With a cry 
He crouched to watch the airmen pass — the first 
That he'd seen under fire. Lord, that was pluck — 
Shells bursting all about them — and what nerve! 
They took their chance, and trusted to their luck. 
At such a dizzy height to dip and swerve. 
Dodging the shell-fire . . . 

Hell! but one was hit, 
And tumbling like a pigeon, plump . . . 

Thank Heaven, 
It righted, and then turned; and after it 
The whole flock followed safe — four, five, six, seven, 
Yes, they were all there safe. He hoped they'd win 
Back to their lines in safety. They deserved, 
Even if they were Germans . . . 'Twas no sin 
To wish them luck. Think how that beggar swerved 
Just in the nick of time! 

He, too, must try 
To win back to the lines, though, likely as not, 
He'd take the wrong turn; but he couldn't lie 
Forever in that hungry hole and rot, 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 107 

He'd got to take his luck, to take his chance 
Of being sniped by foes or friends. He'd be 
With any luck in Germany or France 
Or Kingdom come, next morning . . . 

Drearily 
The blazing day burnt over him, shot and shell 
Whistling and whining ceaselessly. But light 
Faded at last, and as the darkness fell 
He rose, and crawled away into the night. 

JOHN McCRAE: IN FLANDERS FIELDS (1914)^ 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow 

Between the crosses, row on row, 

That mark our place, and in the sky, 
The larks, still bravely singing, fly, 

Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

We are the dead; short days ago 

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 

Loved and were loved, and now we lie 
In Flanders fields. 

Take up our quarrel with the foe! 
To you from failing hands we throw 

The torch; be yours to hold it high! 

If ye break faith with us who die, 
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 
In Flanders fields. 

(c) BRITISH IMPERIALISM VERSUS GERMAN 

A. F. POLLARD: THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 
(January, 191 6.) 

Towards the end of June there appeared in the Kolnische 
Zeitung an article by Professor Schroer, an erudite stu- 
dent of English philology, on the effect of the war upon the 
relations between Great Britain and her colonies. It was an 
extended comment, somewhat on the lines of a lament that 

^ Lieutenant Colonel McCrae, born in Ontario, Canada, in 1872, died in France, 
January 28, 1918. The poem above is said to have been written during the first 
battle of Ypres. 



io8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

was published in Der Tag in April. "We expected," said 
Der Tag "that British India would rise when the first shot 
was fired in Europe, but in reality thousands of Indians came 
to fight with the British against us. We anticipated that 
the whole British Empire would be torn in pieces, but the 
colonies appear to be closer than ever united with the mother 
country. We expected a triumphant rebellion in South 
Africa, yet it turned out nothing but a failure. We expected 
trouble in Ireland, but instead she sent her best soldiers 
against us. Those who led us into all these mistakes and 
miscalculations have laid upon themselves a heavy respon- 
sibility." 

From the point of view of the genesis of the war, it would 
be interesting to discover by whom and with what object 
the German people were thus misled and deceived; but 
Professor Schroer's purpose is to explain the behavior of 
Great Britain's allies and colonies. So irrational and para- 
doxical does their attitude appear to the German political 
theorists that Herr Schroer is driven back on a supernatural 
interpretation, and he discovers the secret in English witch- 
craft! So bewitching are our beaux yeux, or rather our "evil 
eye," that our rebels fall on our neck, and our rivals, for- 
getting the crimes of perfidious Albion, rush to its assistance. 
In this war it was a case of Great Britain rushing to the as- 
sistance of Belgium, Erance, and Russia rather than the 
reverse; but we may pass over that trifle in our search for a 
more rational account of the phenomena than that which 
commends itself to the professor. We are not in England quite 
so convinced of our powers of fascination, whether for good 
or evil, and we suspect that our allies, and perhaps even our 
colonies, are fighting by our side not so much because they 
love us the more, as because they like Germany less. 

In this paper I am not so much concerned with Great 
Britain's allies as with her colonies — their relations to the 
causes of the war and their probable relation to its settle- 
ment. I use the term "colonies" without prejudice: it Is un- 
popular In the great dominions of the British Crown because 
it fails to express their undoubted national status; and a far 
better term would be "realms." The United States has set 
the example of a plurality in unity, and the "British Realms " 
would not be singular In the sphere of political terminology. 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 109 

It represents a better tradition and a truer conception of facts 
than "British Empire." Nor is it without reluctance that I 
write even of probabiUties in connection with the settlement 
after the war. In a British university which attaches great 
importance to political science, I recently ventured to pro- 
pound the question, "Of what value is political science to 
political prophecy.^" The question was regarded as something 
of a slur upon the scientific character of the study of politics, 
but the answers were pitched in a modestly minor key. It is 
clear that anyone who forms or commits to print a forecast 
of the eflfects of this war upon the correlation of British 
realms, runs risks which angels avoid. 

So far as the causes of the war are concerned, the problem 
is more simple, though this simplification does not help 
to dispel the bewilderment of our German critics. For this 
war had no colonial causes. Unlike the Seven Years' War 
of the eighteenth century and the Boer War of 1899, it had no 
roots in a great rivalry in other continents than Europe; and 
Canadians, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, and 
Indians have not trooped to the colors because they were 
menaced within their borders. Great Britain has during 
the last half century had colonial difficulties with France, 
Russia, and the United States, and some of them have 
threatened to bring war within measurable distance. But she 
has had none such with Germany. The partition of Africa 
in 1890 was effected without any serious friction, and the 
friction that arose in Algeciras and Agadir had no reference 
to British colonies. When war broke out in August, 1914, 
there was hardly a cloud on the horizon of British dominions 
across the sea. The war arose over questions that were 
purely European, and Great Britain intervened because she 
could not afford to remain neutral while Germany swept 
away Belgian neutrality and proceeded to conquer France. 
What, it may be asked, was there here to stir Indian princes, 
Boer statesmen, or the miners and farmers of Canada and 
Australia .f' 

There were, no doubt, particular causes of offense which 
tended to provide a common bond of antipathy to the 
ubiquitous German. Indian princes, with a lineage older than 
that of the Hohenzollerns and with a culture more humane, 
had during the Boxer expedition been termed and treated 



no WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

as "niggers"; and more recently the German Crown Prince 
had, on a visit to India, behaved in such a way to his fellow 
guests and hosts that only his character as a guest saved him 
from public resentment. Australians, too, looked with no 
friendly eye on their neighbors in Kaiser Wilhelm's Land and 
the Bismarck Archipelago. But there was nothing in this to 
make war. Neither Canadians nor Australians were fond of 
the Japanese, and it needed a good deal of provocation to 
range Australians and Japanese, Canadians and Hindus in a 
common cause against the Kaiser. It has often been remarked 
that our primitive ancestors felt no need to state and define 
their customs in written codes until they were brought into 
contact with the habits and thoughts of strange nations. That 
contact revealed to their minds the contrast between them 
and the strangers, and also made them appreciate their own 
common inheritance. In some such way the pushing emis- 
saries of Kultur brought home to the British realms the fact 
that behind all their idiosyncrasies of constitution, policy, 
and circumstance there was a community of spirit which only 
grew conscious by contrast, and can best be described in 
terms of contradiction. It would be vainglorious to say that 
the British realms are everything which the German Empire 
is not, but it is a sufficient source of satisfaction that they 
are little what that empire is. The violation of Belgium's 
neutrality and the wanton attack upon France lit up by a 
flash the gulf between British and German politics, and in the 
inevitable clash the British realms were united. None but a 
few extremists in Canada and South Africa protested' that 
those dominions should observe a "national " neutrality while 
the empire was at war. Herzog, Delarey, Beyers, and de Wet 
cherished a blind but not incomprehensible passion for re- 
venge in South Africa; but the handful of French national- 
ists in Canada, who wanted to seize the particular occasion 
when the British Empire and France were at one to establish 
their nationality by standing aloof, present a more complex 
psychological problem. 

This community of spirit was fortified by a community 
of interest. There were no particular colonial interests in 
the war, or causes for colonial intervention; but there was 
a common colonial cause which is best described as naval. 
It left the dominions no choice. They might or they might 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE iii 

not approve Great Britain's scruples about scraps of paper 
or her refusal to regard with idle indifference the German 
spoliation of France. In point of fact they felt less hesita- 
tion than some of the slow-witted folk at home. But whether 
or no they approved of British intervention, there could be 
no doubt of their action when once the die was cast. For the 
event must decide between British and German naval su- 
premacy, and upon that issue depended the liberty and the 
existence of each and all of the British realms. 

It is also contended by Germany — or at least by her apolo- 
gists — that her existence Is likewise involved in the struggle; 
and one of them, a professor of physiology, has lately referred 
to this war as a " death grapple of the English for continued 
supremacy and of the Germans for existence." The phrase is 
a curious illustration of the extent to which men of science 
may go wrong, when dealing with politics, for lack of a little 
history. Germany does not now, and never has depended 
upon sea-power for existence; and no British triumph, how- 
ever complete, could put an end to the German Empire. 
It was created by Bismarck, and maintained by him for 
twenty years as the greatest power in Europe without the 
help of a single man-of-war; and the German navy is a 
whim of the present Kaiser, who overthrew Bismarck to give 
it free indulgence. England, on the other hand, had to es- 
tablish her naval supremacy by beating the Spanish Ar- 
mada before she could found a single colony; without British 
sea-power there could have been no British Empire, and In- 
cidentally no United States of America. Sea-power is of 
Germany's life a thing apart; It Is Britain's whole existence. 
The contention betrays the same mental attitude as does 
the German cry for a " place In the sun." I think I do Ameri- 
cans no injustice when I suggest that they consider the United 
States a very considerable " place In the sun." Britons re- 
gard their little islands in a similar light. But Germany, It 
appears, with an area eighty per cent and a population 
fifty per cent greater than that of the British Isles, is not a 
" place in the sun." Its people sit in darkness without hope 
of the sun except in realms that belong to others; the sun- 
shine Is not within them, and they seek to take it by force. 

Their object is not a place In the sun, but control of the sun- 
shine; and hence their objection to British sea-power. Their 



112 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

complaint has been plausibly put by the former Secretary of 
State for the Colonies, Herr Dernburg. "The whole fight 
and all the fight," he says, "is on one side for the absolute 
dominion of the seven seas; on the other side for a free sea — 
the traditional mare liberum. A free sea will mean the cessa- 
tion of the danger of war and the stopping of world wars. 
The sea should be free to all. It belongs to no nation in par- 
ticular — neither to the British, nor to the Germans, nor to 
the Americans. The rights of nations cease with the territorial 
line of three miles from low tide. Any dominion exercised 
beyond that line is a breach and an infringement of the rights 
of others." 

In the light of history and of the most recent events, it 
is difficult to share Herr Dernburg's optimistic belief that 
"a free sea will mean the cessation of the danger of war." 
For what had the freedom of the seas to do with the German 
wars against Denmark in 1864, against Austria in 1866, and 
against France in 1870, or with Austria's ultimatum to 
Serbia and the Kaiser's to Russia in July, 1914? Can Herr 
Dernburg mean that if the sea were rid of British dominion, 
no European state could rely on her aid and thus venture to 
challenge the Kaiser's dominion on land.^ But Herr Dern- 
burg's following statements are unimpeachable. It is true 
that the sea should be free to all; it is a fact that it belongs 
to no particular nation, and that Great Britain's sovereignty, 
like that of every other nation, ceases with her territorial 
waters. Where, then, is the dominion of which he complains, 
and what is the German grievance.^ There is no sovereignty 
of the sea, and the "traditional mare liherum^^ has long been 
an established fact. Great Britain enjoys thereon no right 
and exercises no authority that Is not enjoyed and exercised 
by all peoples that go down to the sea in ships. Germany has 
least of all cause to complain. Upon that freedom of the sea, 
enjoyed during British supremacy, she has built up a vast 
fabric of oceanic trade and domestic prosperity without let 
or hindrance; her great liners have freely used even British 
ports and territorial waters, and drawn not a little profit 
from British traffic and passengers; and she has been given 
a freedom of trade which she has herself denied to Great 
Britain. 

Other peoples had explored and charted the waters of 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 113 

the globe, and had given the Hves of some of the noblest 
of their sons in the cause of discovering passages here and 
passages there, and revealing the hidden dangers of the deep. 
In the days of the merchant adventurers and chartered com- 
panies, mariners had sailed with their lives in their hands, 
and the risks that the trader ran made heavy demands on 
his profits. They cleared the waters of pirates and made 
the high seas a secure and familiar highway. Germany con- 
tributed nothing to the science of navigation, the discovery 
of new worlds, or the pacification of the ocean. She has en- 
tered into the inheritance of other men's labors and sacri- 
fice without paying toll or fee. No German Franklin or Gil- 
bert braved the Atlantic In sixty-ton barques or left his 
bones to bleach on the Arctic ice. The German has ever been 
the pedlar and not the pioneer of civilization, the follower 
of the camp and not the leader of the van. He bred neither 
conquistadores nor Pilgrim Fathers; and In these latter days, 
while the eagles of enterprise — Peary, Amundsen, Scott — 
winged their flight to the poles, the vultures swooped down 
upon Belgium. Is the mare liherum to be a sea for similar 
German liberties.^ The Inhuman use Germany has made of 
her one submarine talent illumines the path she would tread 
if she possessed the ten talents of naval supremacy. 

In default of German naval predominance, however, Herr 
Dernburg would be content with peace on the ocean and 
protection from British power. "To prevent wars In the fu- 
ture," he declares, " we must establish that the free seas shall 
be plied exclusively by the merchant marine of all nations. 
Within their territory people have the right to take such 
measures as they may deem necessary for their defense, but 
the sending of troops and war machines Into the territory 
of others or into neutralized parts of the world must be de- 
clared a casus belli. ... If that be done, the world as it Is 
divided now would come to permanent peace." 

Again, he is optimistic. In 1839 Belgium was declared by 
all the great powers of Europe — including Prussia — to be a 
"neutralized part of the world," and the breach of its neu- 
trality was pronounced a casus belli. But where is the "per- 
manent peace," and with what assurance can the violators 
of Belgian neutrality appeal for the neutralization of the 
sea? The appeal is sublime in its colossal simpHcIty. The 



114 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

German grievance against British "dominion" on sea is 
that it saves other continents from the interpretations of 
neutraHty which the Kaiser applied to Belgium and Luxem- 
burg; a "neutral" state was to give German armies free 
passage for their offensive, and a "neutral" sea is to protect 
them during their progress. Herr Dernburg's proposed 
prohibition of the transport of armed forces across the sea 
would leave Belgium and France at the mercy of German 
invasion by land, while forbidding British assistance from 
over the water; and Germany would thus derive from a 
mare liberum the advantage of real liberty in Europe! The 
scheme might. Indeed, from the purely insular point of view 
have some attractions for Britons — if only they could rely 
on scraps of paper. For presumably Germany would be 
precluded, as well as Great Britain, from the use of the seas 
for other than mercantile objects. Great Britain and all 
her dominions would thus be secure from German invasion. 
We imagine, too, that Herr Dernburg would extend his 
benevolence to the air, and give it the benefit of the neutral- 
ity with which he aims at endowing the sea. But would he 
voluntarily have left German colonies in Africa open to 
military attack from their French and British neighbors 
and precluded himself from the possibility of sending assist- 
ance by sea.^ Would he, clothed in his mantle of naval 
neutrality, have philosophically left Tsing-tau to be re- 
covered by China, and Luderitz Bay by the Herreros.^ Possi- 
bly even these sacrifices might have been made in the hope 
of seeing Canada and India cut off from British assistance 
by the isolating sea, though one may doubt whether Herr 
Dernburg really desires just now to see either an American 
Canada or a Russian Empire of India. 

It is to be feared that Herr Dernburg does not pay his 
readers the compliment of exaggerating their intelligence; 
and his naval pacifism is somewhat belated and lopsided. 
It would have been more useful at the time when Great 
Britain was suggesting in vain "naval holidays" and a 
limitation of armaments; and It would have been more 
logical had It Included armies as well as navies. The world 
can hardly be expected to impose peace In spheres of Ger- 
many's weakness, and to leave free to her mailed fist and 
shining armor the spheres of her strength. We all of us hope 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 115 

for a limitation of armaments, and most of us think that this 
war will have been fought in vain unless it results in an 
increase of arbitration and a restriction of force. But in view 
of what has happened, we are bound to be more solicitous 
about protecting the little nations in times of peace than 
about protecting German commerce from the consequences 
of a war which she has provoked. There is much to be said 
for abolishing altogether the weapons of war, but nothing 
at all for confining fleets to territorial waters and leaving 
armies free to roam at large over other people's land. Armies 
on land produce greater "starvation" than fleets at sea, and 
the Central Empires have far more eifectlvely prevented 
Russia from selling her harvests to western Europe than the 
British fleet has excluded supplies from Germany. 

Apart from this motive of neutralizing British sea-power 
and thus liberating German militarism from restraint, Herr 
Dernburg's scheme Is an invitation to neutrals to assist, by 
means of a new-fangled law of the sea, in the dismemberment 
of the British Empire. He knows that the sea is the spinal 
cord of that empire, and that his policy of isolation would, 
by neutralizing Its communications, leave It as invertebrate 
as the German Empire would be, If the roads and railways 
were cut which link up Prussia with Saxony and Bavaria; 
and his proposal is as naif, as would be an international 
commission to neutralize the communications of the com- 
ponent parts of the German Empire. His suggestion helps 
us, however, to understand the whole-hearted co-operation 
of the British realms In this European war. Mahan's words 
have not fallen on deaf ears In British dominions. No com- 
pulsion, no suggestion even, was required from Downing 
Street to evoke lavish oifers of service from every quarter. 
Had Great Britain been compelled to rely on compulsion, 
she would have been powerless. She could not have extracted 
by force a man or a dollar from Canada, South Africa, 
Australia, New Zealand, or India. Help was forthcoming 
because every dominion and colony knew that upon the 
supremacy of the British navy and the maintenance of these 
communications by sea depended the very existence of the 
British Empire and the freedom of each of its realms to 
develop its own unfettered future. That Is why the old vat- 
icinations about the disruption of the empire have proved 



ii6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

so signally false; that is why, even amid the horrors and 
venom of war, we can feel indebted to Germany. The greater 
the threat to British naval power, the stronger the bond of 
unity between British dominions. To the Kaiser and von 
Tiipitz we owe not a little of the modern growth of British 
imperial sentiment; and the disappearance of every danger 
would test the unity of the British realms more severely than 
any German ambitions. They are protected, but not held 
together by force; and nothing binds closer the bonds of 
consent than the threat of forcible dissolution. 

That is the secret of British witchcraft and German be- 
wilderment. The votaries of the gospel of might are blind 
to the strength of affection, and German publicists and 
philosophers have frankly confessed their complete Inability 
to understand the British Empire. How we could afford, 
within five years of the conclusion of a bitter war, to allow 
the Boers far more liberty than Germany could after forty 
grant to Alsace-Lorraine, how we could govern three hundred 
millions in India with smaller forces than Germany could 
govern four millions across the Rhine, were questions be- 
yond the scope of their political conception. Some even saw 
in that contrast a proof of British impotence, thinking no 
doubt that force is the only foundation of power, and ignor- 
ing the fact that military strength Is a common symptom of 
moral weakness. The misunderstanding was naturally most 
comprehensive In the militarist mind; but It is not confined 
to militarists or even to Germany. It is not, indeed, easy to 
explain the British Empire to Britons themselves; and the 
difficulty arises from a conservative clinging to obsolete 
views and a failure to grasp the significance of modern 
developments. Some people still think of the British Empire 
as unchanged since the days of George the Third; and as 
late as 1840, the Duke of Wellington affirmed that its two 
fundamental principles — the responsibility of colonial execu- 
tives to colonial parliaments, and Imperial unity — were 
incompatible. The term "empire" Is Itself unhappy and 
incorrect, for nothing less like an empire than the British 
realms could well be conceived. Empire Implies absolute rule 
and militarist methods; It is a scientific description of the 
Kaiser's Germany, but it has no relevance to the realms of 
George the Fifth. As "emperor" he possesses no legal or 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 117 

constitutional powers whatever, and "empire" defines 
neither his nor any other Briton's authority. In the British 
Isles and colonies he is simply king, and the Act which made 
Queen Victoria Empress of India conferred but a high- 
sounding title. 

The singular word obscures a vital diversity. In Professor 
Cramb's popular but shallow book, which attempts to trans- 
plant the teachings of Treitschke to British soil, it is laid 
down that the purpose of the British Empire is to give 
everyone of its citizens an English mind. Nothing could 
be more fatuous or more false. If it were true, there might be 
a difference in degree, but there would be none in essence, 
between the British and the German Empires, and British 
might stand in the dock with German Kultur. For the funda- 
mental objection to German Kultur is not Its barbarity, but 
its uniformity and its insolence. Its belief In a single superior 
type, and its claim to force that type upon others; while the 
essence of the British Empire Is heterogeneity, a lack of 
system, and the mutual forbearance of its component parts. 
Possibly that Is why it angers as well as puzzles the German 
mind. To Potsdam, If not to Vienna, the British Empire 
must seem a loose and ramshackle affair, with no logical 
claim to existence in a world of scientific bureaucracy. Its 
function Is not to impose an English mind on Irishmen, 
Scots, and Welshmen, Boers, Moslems, and Hindus; and 
we no more expect to turn Australians Into Englishmen than 
to convert them Into French-Canadians. Its function is to 
enable them all to develop a mind of their own. We believed, 
indeed, in uniformity In the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, just as we tried an irresponsible government — 
like the Kaiser's — under the Stuarts, and sought to colonize 
Ireland with the same methods and results as Germany is 
seeking to-day to settle her Polish provinces. But we — or 
most of us — learnt better in time; and Germany, too, will 
learn better when she Is rid of her twentieth-century despots 
with their seventeenth-century notions of government. It is 
the German ex-Chancellor himself who quotes with approval 
another German statesman to the effect that the Germans 
are "political asses"; and BernhardI expresses the mind of 
the General Staff when he says that no people are less fitted 
to govern themselves than the Germans. 



ii8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Here lies another reason for colonial co-operation in the 
war. All self-governing communities are vitally interested in 
resistance to this German political atavism, just as English 
liberalism was concerned in the successful resistance of the 
American colonies to coercion hy George the Third. Had he 
succeeded in that attempt, he would without doubt have also 
succeeded in riveting personal rule on England; and if the 
Kaiser wins this war, junkerdom will be supreme in Ger- 
many and in Europe for at least a generation, and countries 
outside Europe will either have to fight or submit to a 
dictation to which they have not been accustomed, and from 
which the British navy has so far afforded protection. For, 
after all, the Monroe Doctrine is not even a scrap of paper, 
and its value depends to-day and to-morrow either upon 
the British navy or upon an American navy which is willing 
to fight and able to conquer the German fleet. British colonies 
cannot, of course, rely upon the United States navy; they 
have no option but to rely on the British Empire if they wish 
to avoid the Procrustean bed of German Kultur. "Every 
state," writes Treitschke, "must have the right to merge 
into one the nationalities contained within itself." That is 
the fundamental distinction between the two empires. 
British naval supremacy does not mean the merging of any 
nationality. It does not subject British colonies or anyone 
else to dominion. It is their guarantee of freedom, and it is 
by no chance collocation of events that the century of com- 
plete British naval supremacy has witnessed the greatest 
growth of nationalities that the world has ever seen. 

Dominion, In fact, is not the characteristic of the British 
Empire, but rather the absence of it. The German foible is 
to see dominion everywhere and to want to grasp It. Great 
Britain does not own Canada or Australia or South Africa; 
they are owned by the people who live there. Even the waste 
lands in British colonies were long ago recognized as the 
property of the colony and not of the mother country; and 
there is not an acre of land outside the British Isles from 
which the British government derives a farthing of revenue. 
The colonies do, indeed, help to support the British navy, 
and they have sent large contingents to Its armies In this 
war; but all is done by free gift and not by Imposition. The 
colonies are free to govern themselves and even to tax British 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 119 

imports and exclude British subjects from their borders. 
Only thus could the British Empire exist, because it is based 
on freedom. The denial of responsible self-government to the 
British realms, as the Hohenzollerns have denied it to the 
German people, would have broken up the empire long ago. 
The Kaiser envies and wishes to emulate the British realms; 
but he declines to make that self-sacrifice of will without 
which there cannot be political salvation; and he does not 
see that it has only been through that sacrifice, through the 
recognition of the right of each British realm to govern 
itself by means of its own responsible ministers, that the 
British Empire maintains its unity and strength. He wills 
the end but not the means; he craves for British world- 
power, but repudiates the conditions of its existence. Ger- 
mans attribute British success to scandalous good luck. Had 
they possessed all Great Britain's initial advantages, they 
would have thrown them all away through their will-to- 
power and their lust for absolute dominion. We believe in no 
power that is not based on service and guarded by respon- 
sibility; they base power on prerogative and guard it by 
lese-majeste. Government by consent is the secret of empire 
which Germany will be taught by the present war. It is a 
simple matter of recognizing the liberties of others, and 
purging one's soul of the poison that any man, dynasty, or 
nation has the right to govern another against Its will. 

There is no peculiar British witchcraft in this lore of 
statesmanship, though we cannot forbear admiration of its 
working when we behold Boer generals, who were fighting 
us in the field fifteen years ago, turning Germans out of 
South Africa and then volunteering to serve with British 
armies in Europe. They had their choice and they made it, 
because they had had experience of German and British 
government; and not for their lives would they substitute 
one for the other. For one is dominion and the other is 
liberty. Even on the high seas British "dominion" has made 
and maintained mare liberum. In peace there is no discrimina- 
tion, and ships of all nations frequent the waters with equal 
security. In war Great Britain does not sink neutral vessels 
nor take toll of neutral lives. She merely exercises the bel- 
ligerent rights which all powers have used in turn and are 
expressly sanctioned by international consent. Britannia 



120 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

rules the waves only in patriotic poems, and in the sense 
that she is stronger than any other naval power; her "domin- 
ion" consists in the free course of international law and in 
the exercise of rights which are common to all. In peace she 
claims no rights and does no acts of sovereignty; but when 
the peace is broken she cannot defend herself and others if 
she waives the rights, and refrains from the acts, of war. 
The cause she conceives herself to be defending is the 
liberty of little nations and the freedom of British realms. 
The liberty of Belgium and Serbia is an issue which few can 
mistake; but the freedom of the British realms is a stumbling 
block to other than German intellects. An American, who 
has lived much among us, proclaims that he has great respect 
for the English people but none for the British Empire; and 
another writer in a work on "Alexander Hamilton" avers 
that "a democracy pretending to a sovereignty over other 
democracies is either a phantom or the most intolerable of 
all. oppressions." The general truth of this aphorism we do 
not dispute, but it has no relevance to the British realms, 
which do not consist of a democracy pretending to a sov- 
ereignty over other democracies. Canada is no more ruled by 
Mr. Asquith than England is by Sir Robert Borden, and 
Britons never by any chance speak of colonists as their sub- 
jects. They are our fellow subjects, or rather, our partners 
in the sovereignty we exercise and enjoy. That sovereignty 
is not the dominion of one over other British realms any 
more than the sovereignty of the United States is the domin- 
ion of Connecticut over Texas. The concern is a joint-stock 
enterprise, and the Crown is the capital of the firm, John 
Bull and Co. John Bull is, indeed, the senior partner, but the 
other realms are partners too. Each has a call on the resources 
of the company, and each has behind it the reserves of the 
British Empire. The partnership is none the less real be- 
cause it is undefined and because the partners have not 
written out and proclaimed to the world their articles of 
agreement. A written, inflexible constitution is only required 
when the tradition and habit of co-operation are weak; and 
the unity of the British realms is one of the spirit and not of 
the letter, a bond of blood and sympathy and not a parch- 
ment deed. Its terms are nowhere stated, but they are every- 
where understood. 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 121 

The war may provoke in Impatient minds attempts at 
further definition. Some, who fall to discern the spirit ex- 
cept through material manifestations, are ever pressing for 
the crystallization of British unity In paper Acts of Union or 
Federation. But while the British realms are eager for co- 
operation, they will not tolerate uniformity, and nothing 
would tend more surely towards disintegration than efforts 
to impose a constitution. The essential features in their 
government have grown and hot been made; and our cabinet 
systems and prime ministers were never created by Acts of 
Parliament. Even responsible government itself was not 
conferred by statute; it Is a mere practice adopted step by 
step for convenience and adapted to the changing mood of 
circumstance; and the fundamentals of our constitutions are 
not their laws, but their customs. It Is not by formal federa- 
tion that the British realms will gather the fruits of their 
common sacrifice, or express the common aims to which the 
war has added Impulse. The "councils" of the empire will 
continue to resemble those mediaeval English "counsels" 
rather than the formal bodies into which they have been 
converted in imagination by mistranslation of the ambiguous 
Latin concilia of the chroniclers. The Imperial conference may 
develop Into the Imperial cabinet; but it will not become a 
federal council, and like its prototypes throughout the 
empire it will remain unknown to the statute law of the 
British realms. It will become a custom of the constitution 
long before it becomes an Act of Parliament. 

The material, and still more the moral, value of the assist- 
ance rendered by his junior partners to John Bull constitutes, 
however, an increase of their stake In the joint concern, and 
involves a corresponding Increase of weight In the counsels 
of the empire and the world. This consideration will affect 
some of the details In the settlement. Australia will certainly 
not be content to relinquish the German colonies in the 
Pacific conquered by the arms of the Commonwealth, nor 
South Africa those subdued by the Union. From her own 
particular point of view Great Britain might have preferred 
an indemnity to any extension of territory; but regard for the 
peace of her partners will probably compel her to shoulder 
the financial burden of the war without relief from the 
compensation which Germany will have to pay for her sins 



122 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

against Belgium and civilization. But these gains in the 
Pacific and in Africa will be trifling compared with the 
fruits of earlier victories and the colossal sacrifice of men and 
treasure in this war. Australia and New Zealand will have 
nothing material to show for the thousands of gallant lives 
they have lost at the Dardanelles, and Canada will have no 
territorial recompense for her heroic sacrifice in Flanders. 
If there are to be material gains in the reduction of arma- 
ments, the destruction of militarism, and the promised reign 
of peace, the British realms will share them on no more than 
equal terms with the rest of the world. 

War might have paid a victorious Germany; it will not 
pay a triumphant British Empire, and we are content that 
it should not. It was not for profit that the British realms 
interposed. " Had we counted the cost.?" asked the German 
Chancellor on the eve of our intervention. In a sense we 
had, in a sense we had not. In either case the cost was not 
the material point. The British realms stood in August, 1914, 
where Luther stood at the Diet of Worms — they could do 
no other than they did. They could not afford to fall short 
of the standard set by Belgium and her heroic king, and 
ignobly ignore his appeal against might. Nor, in the face of 
that example, are they anxious to boast of their virtue; 
compared with Belgium's temptation to peace and her 
sacrifice for the sake of her honor, their own temptations and 
sufferings have been slight. "Above all the nations stands 
humanity" is a famous legend In a great American univer- 
sity; and the merit of the British realms consists merely in 
this; they set enough store on humanity to strike a blow in 
its defense, and in its cause they did not hesitate to fight. 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 123 

(d) IDEALS OF ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION 

L. P. JACKS: MILITARISM AND INDUSTRIALISM (1915) 1 

VI 

Ladies and gentlemen, all the changes I have described 
run together into one and lead our minds in the same direc- 
tion. They are driving the thoughts of the nation to the roots 
of things. They are forcing us to question the whole basis 
of our civilization. With the war before our eyes we are pre- 
pared to find that there is something radically wrong. We 
are beginning to suspect that the mischief is deep-seated. It 
is true that these suspicions had often been roused before this 
war broke out. A visit to the slums will rouse them any day. 
But the war has made this difference: it has brought us all 
together into a suspicious frame of mind; so that if anybody 
could make clear to us what the driving forces of civiliza- 
tion really are, the mind of the nation would at once chal- 
lenge these forces to give an account of themselves and hold 
them under suspicion until they could prove their innocence. 

Now there are two great forces which as everybody knows 
have been mightily at work in European history for the last 
hundred years. One is militarism, the other is industrialism. 
The mind of the nation is thinking deeply about both of 
them. Militarism we have always suspected: industrialism 
has borne a better characte:", though some of us have had 
our .doubts. But recently there have been signs — and they 
have been especially prominent in Germany — that these 
two forces are much more intimately connected than once 
seemed possible. What have militarism and industrialism 
to do with one another.'' How are they related .f" the war has 
thrown a new light on that question and I will try to ex- 
press some of our thoughts. 

On a superficial view we are tempted to describe the re- 
lation of industrialism to militarism as one of antagonism. 
The two principles are simply opposed the one to the other. 
Industrialism, we think, makes for peace; militarism for war. 
Whence follows the simple conclusion that the destruction 

* The conclusion of a lecture on "The Changing Mind of a Nation at War." 



124 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

of militarism will leave the peace-making principle In control 
of civilization and fighting will be at an end. 

I believe that thoughtful people are becoming more and 
more dissatisfied with this simple account of the matter. 

To begin with, there is the fact, staring us in the face that 
an age which is saturated with industrialism has given birth 
to the bloodiest and most destructive war the world has ever 
seen. We have no need, at this point, to assert the disputable 
proposition that industrialism has caused the war. Let us 
content ourselves, with the indisputable proposition, that 
industrialism has not prevented the war. 

If industrialism were essentially pacific this failure to pre- 
vent the war would be hard to understand. As the dominant 
interest of nations and individuals, and as making always 
for peace, how has it come to pass, we may well ask, that in- 
dustrialism has been unable to restrain the forces which 
make for war, and for war on the most stupendous scale.'* 
We had flattered ourselves that commerce by multiplying 
and strengthening the ties between nations, would make it 
impossible for these to tear themselves asunder and engage 
in mutual destruction. The event has proved we were in 
error. 

Reflecting more deeply on its failure to keep the peace, a 
suspicion gains ground that industrialism when unchecked 
by other forces may be a positive cause of war. By increasing 
the wealth, the ostentation, and the pride of the peoples, 
does it not serve to accentuate their rivalries, to deepen their 
jealousies, and to inflame their predatory passions.'' Is it not 
true that, wherever great treasure-chests exist, there, will 
robbers be found also; and is the treasure less provocative 
of covetousness when gained by commerce, than when ex- 
torted from the labor of slaves or exacted by the ransom 
of conquered cities.'* Are two nations, rich and happy in the 
sort of happiness that comes from riches, more likely to be 
friends than two poor nations each possessing nothing which 
tempts the cupidity of the other.'' 

For example, is not one of the chief causes of the present 
hostility between Germany and Great Britain to be found 
in the fact that both of them, as we say, " have done so well 
in business " .? Is it of no significance that war broke out at the 
very time when each was "doing better than ever".'' Elimi- 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 125 

nate from the complex of conditions out of which the war 
arose, the circumstance that industry had made both these 
nations rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and may we not 
say without hesitation that war between them would not have 
taken place? 

What answer shall we give to these questions? Shall we 
take refuge in the argument that industrialism shows these 
baleful tendencies only because it is imperfectly developed, 
and has not yet become truly international in character? 
Shall we plead for a finer articulation of the commercial 
tie, and for more industrialism rather than less? Will our 
dream of the millennium be the conversion of the whole 
human race into a Universal Joint Stock Company? Are we, 
in a word, to content ourselves with the suppression of mili- 
tarism and trust the weal of the race to the working out of 
the industrial principle, unhampered by the interference of 
its military yoke-fellow? 

Such answers show, I cannot help thinking, that we are 
legislating for mankind without reckoning with man, as we 
so often fail to do. They leave untouched the tap-root of 
war — that primitive instinct which the old legislation sought 
to restrain by the command "Thou shalt not covet." 

Let us assume the extreme case and suppose that on the 
conclusion of the war the nations of Europe, convinced of 
their folly and wickedness, abandon every form of armament 
and determine for the future to spend not one farthing of the 
national wealth on armies or fortresses or fleets. What would 
follow? 

The immediate result would be the liberation of an enor- 
mous amount of wealth hitherto set aside for military pur- 
poses. The greater part of this wealth would flow into in- 
dustrial channels. It is fair to assume that industrialism 
would be the gainer annually to the extent of five hundred 
million sterling and of a labor force represented by twenty 
millions of men. This is a prospect that ought to make the 
mouths water of those who think that industrial wealth is 
the foundation of human good. 

Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the United States 
— to speak of no others — rich as they now are, would then 
grow enormously richer. The natural resources of the earth 
would be exploited to an extent of which the present economic 



126 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

development, vast as it is, affords no measure. The mere cir- 
cumstance that each nation might pursue its gains undis- 
turbed by the risk of aggression from the others would bring 
a vast accession of confidence, and therefore of efficiency, 
to the labor and capital employed. The total population of 
the earth would grow by leaps and bounds. And under any 
fairly equitable scheme of distribution there would be enough 
wealth in the world to render every member of the human 
race well-off. 

But would there be peace? 

Long before the pleasing process we have imagined could 
work itself out every one of the great communities would 
be torn to pieces by civil wars. This, I mean, is what would 
assuredly happen if we suppose the economic process to go 
on without some fundamental change in the ethos of man- 
kind. 

The peace of nations depends only in part on the suppres- 
sion of militarism. In yet larger measure it depends on the 
absence of disruptive tendencies in the nations themselves. 

What these disruptive tendencies can do, or at least what 
they can threaten, was made sufficiently clear in Great 
Britain during the few months which preceded the outbreak 
of war. Nor were we alone in this danger. I need not enter 
into particulars, for the facts are well known. France, Ger- 
many, Austria, Russia — even the United States — were seeth- 
ing with discontent. I recall the remark made to me by an 
American statesman in 191 2. Speaking of the prevalerit 
social unrest he said, " We are on the eve of a greater crisis 
than that of our Civil War." 

Internal disruption is the inevitable fate of every nation 
whose ethos, or ideal, rests upon a purely industrial creed. 
The larger the scope for pure industrialism and the fewer 
the checks which hold it in restraint, the more rapidly do 
the disruptive tendencies gather head and the more de- 
structive do they become. It is not the poorest nations which 
reveal the maximum of social discontent. It is the richest. 
And the prime cause of this does not lie in the sense of 
inequality between individuals who have more and in- 
dividuals who have less; that, no doubt, is a cause, but 
secondary. The root evil is, that a community which makes 
wealth its object, and pursues it on the terms laid down by 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 127 

the economic machine, is living under conditions which 
satisfy nobody and against which all men are, by the higher 
human nature, born rebels. From this point of view success 
in the economic enterprise is even worse for a nation than 
failure. The greater the accumulation of wealth the more 
dissatisfied do men become with the conditions of a merely 
economic life. Industrial communities are always more 
restless when trade is good than when trade is bad, as 
though the rottenness of the system could only be revealed 
by its triumph. Seldom, however, does the restless spirit 
penetrate to the true cause of the trouble. Unaware that the 
trouble comes from the original vice of the whole enterprise 
on which we are engaged, we throw upon our fellow victims 
the blame for the common lot, thinking that because these 
suffer less than ourselves therefore they are responsible for 
our sufferings — like the emigrants in the sinking ship who 
in the blindness of their despair fell upon the first-class 
passengers and tore them to pieces. 

In short, the common pursuit of wealth is not a human 
bond. It leads to the invention of schemes and machinery of 
every kind — material, political, and social; but, of itself, it 
can never lead to the vital organization of mankind. Nay 
rather, in spite of all that has been said of its unifying 
tendency, we cannot doubt that its final working is to dis- 
integrate the community. Seekers of buried treasure in- 
variably quarrel among themselves, for reasons which are 
manifest to a child. They may arrange the most equitable 
scheme for the division of the spoils, and seal their mutual 
loyalty with fearful oaths, but before the voyage is over the 
captain will be at the yardarm and the deck will be slippery 
with the blood of half the crew. Whether they sail under the 
Jolly Roger, or under the red ensign of industrial civilization, 
makes little difference. Whether the spoil be buried in a 
pirate's cavern or in the unexploited resources of the earth, 
it all comes to the same thing. 

Nor must we forget that the disruptive tendencies of pure 
industrialism have hitherto been largely held in check by 
militarism itself. There can hardly be a doubt that for many 
years past the common fear of foreign aggression and the 
common need of being prepared for it have played a very 
considerable part, against contrary forces working from 



128 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

within, in maintaining the cohesion of every one of the great 
States now at war. And if the question were raised, in which 
of the great communities of the modern world have the 
signs of economic disruption been most abundant, should 
we not have to point for answer to that country which is at 
once the wealthiest and the least menaced by foreign war, 
and where all classes have the largest share of this world's 
goods — the United States ? 

By this time we are all agreed about one thing: milita- 
rism — I mean the kind of militarism in which Germany has 
set the example — must go. Whether a nobler militarism may 
arise hereafter is a question; but of this kind we have had 
enough and more than enough. But let us be under no delu- 
sion as to the sequel. W'^hen militarism goes the check will be 
removed which has so far prevented industrialism from pro- 
ducing its bitterest fruits. If, therefore, the war merely 
yields the negative result of destroying militarism, we may 
lay our account with the certainty that there are yet greater 
troubles in store for the world. 

But there is ground for hope in the very magnitude of the 
present calamity. Let me remind you of something I have 
already mentioned in another connection: I mean the way in 
which the lessons of the war are coming simultaneously to 
vast multitudes of persons. Apply that to the mind of 
Europe as a whole. All the nations involved in the struggle 
are learning the same lesson at the same time. All are engaged 
together in the bitter but salutary process of discovering their 
souls. A piecemeal repentance of the nations, following a 
series of partial conflicts, might effect very little; a simulta- 
neous repentance, imposed by a world-war, may effect a 
great deal. 

Whatever new wisdom, whatever vision of the weak spot 
in civilization are coming to ourselves as a result of the war, 
we may be very sure that the same wisdom, the same vision, 
are coming, in the same way, to our allies and to our enemies. 
Realizing this, may we not believe that beneath the fierce and 
bloody oppositions of the hour a profound principle of unity 
is at work.^ 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 129 

ARTHUR HENDERSON: VICTORY ^ 

Victory is a word on the lips of many people. It is a word 
which the statesmen of the Allied countries and of the Cen- 
tral Empires alike use quite freely, but with a very restricted 
application. To most the meaning of victory is limited to a 
striking military success. There is a grave danger that the 
moral as well as the social implications of victory may be 
forgotten or ignored. Any victory, however spectacular and 
dramatic in a military sense it may be, which falls short of 
the realization of the ideals with which we entered the war, 
will not be a victory but a defeat. We strive for victory 
because we want to end war altogether, not merely to prove 
the superiority of British arms over those of Germany. We 
continue the struggle, dreadful though the cost of it has 
become, because we have to enforce reparation for a great 
wrong perpetrated upon a small unoffending nation, to 
liberate subject peoples and enable them to live under a 
form of government of their own choosing, and to destroy, 
not a great nation, but a militarist autocracy which had 
deliberately planned war without considering the interests 
either of their own people or of the European Common- 
wealth of which they were a part. 

For the people of this country these are still the objects of 
the war. The ideals with which we entered the struggle have 
not been lowered. On the contrary the aims of the people, 
the ends for which they are prepared still to suffer and serve, 
obscured though they may be by the clamant imperialism 
of the dominant class, have become a rooted resolve. They 
will not suffer the war aims of this country to be transformed 
into a program of conquest and annexation. They will sanc- 
tion only such territorial and political changes in Europe, 
Asia, and Africa as will make possible the creation of a 
society of free nations pledged to maintain peace, protected 
by mutual guarantees, extended to the small nations as well 
as great, against oppression and unfair attack from any 
warlike state. In seeking to attain these ends we ought not 
to rely entirely upon forces -in the field; nor ought we to 
deceive ourselves by thinking that a military victory, how- 
ever complete and overwhelming, will suffice to establish an 
1 Chapter IX of "The Aims of Labor" (1918). 



I30 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

international order in which there is no danger of future 
war. We desire a victory which cannot be won wholly by the 
armies in the field. Sufficient use has not been made of the 
moral, political, and diplomatic weapons which the Allies 
have at their disposal. There Is a danger of substituting 
military success and the desire for territory for noble ideals 
and great principles. In thus subordinating the moral to the 
material we mock the sacrifice of our heroic dead and forget 
God, for which no military success can make amends. Long 
before the war had reached this present stage, a great moral 
offensive should have been launched, supplementing the 
military effort, with the object of bringing home to the 
hearts and minds of the enemy peoples the real truth about 
the war. Since conscience and reason do not end upon the 
frontiers of Central Europe, the democratic case, which the 
leaders of the popular movement in the Allied countries 
could present to the social democracy of Germany, would 
prove convincing enough to shorten the war materially. 
It would clarify the real issues of the war in every country. 
It is a grave fault on the part of those who direct Allied 
policy that they have so far neglected to use political 
and diplomatic as well as military methods to achieve vic- 
tory. 

When victory in the sense of the collapse of the military 
power in the Central Empires Is at last achieved, we shall 
be confronted with the task of translating military success 
into Its political, economic, and social equivalents In this 
country and every other. It will not be a democratic victory 
if it results merely in the restoration of the capitalistic 
regime which the war has discredited and destroyed. Victory 
for the people means something more than the continuance of 
the old system of production for the profit of a small owning 
class, on the basis of wage-slavery for the producing classes. 
The hard, cruel, competitive system of production must be 
replaced by a system of co-operation under which the status 
of the workers will be revolutionized, and In which the 
squalor and poverty, the economic Insecurity and social 
miseries of the past will have no place. This is the great task 
before the statesmen and politicians of the future. 

Then we must remember that the coming period of re- 
construction, even more than the remaining period of the 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 131 

war, will impose upon the leaders of all the civilized States 
new and searching tests of character and intellect. As we 
draw nearer to the end of the war we begin to see more 
clearly the magnitude of the problems that peace will bring. 
So vast, intricate, and fundamental have been the changes 
wrought during the last three and a half years that we are 
sometimes tempted to think the will and intelligence of men 
will be unequal to the task of dealing with them. Still more 
may we fear sometimes that the problems of reconstruction 
will be handled by men too impatient to think things 
through, too tired and cynical to respond to the glowing 
faith in a finer future for the world which now inspires the 
multitudes of common people who have striven so heroically 
and suffered so patiently during the war. For national 
leadership to fall into the hands of such men in the great 
new days upon which we shall presently enter would be a 
disaster almost as great as the war itself. If there could be 
anything worse than an empiric in control of state policy 
when peace comes, it would be the influence of a cynic upon 
the splendid enthusiasm and revolutionary ardor of democ- 
racy, newly awakened to a consciousness of its power and 
eager to build a better future for mankind. 

The outstanding fact of world politics at the present time 
— and when peace comes this fact will be made still more 
clear — Is that a great tide of revolutionary feeling is rising 
in every country. Everywhere the peoples are becoming 
conscious of power. They are beginning to sit in judgment 
upon their rulers. They are beginning to ask questions about 
the policies that have brought the world to the edge of sec- 
ular ruin. In this war the people have shown themselves 
capable of heroic sacrifices and resolute endurance because 
they love liberty and desire peace. The hope that the Issue 
of this war will be an increase of freedom, not only for them- 
selves, but for those who have lived under the yoke of alien 
tyrannies, has sustained the people of this country through- 
out these years of war. It has caused them to pour out the 
blood of their best and bravest, to surrender hard-won liber- 
ties, to toil unremittingly in factory, field, and mine, to 
spend without stint the material wealth accumulated through 
years of peace and prosperity. These sacrifices will not have 
been made in vain If the territorial and political changes to 



132 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

be made in Europe, Asia, and Africa embody the idea of 
public right, and estabhsh an enduring peace between the 
nations that emperors, diplomatists, and capitalists will not 
be able to shake. 

But the people will not choose to entrust their destinies at 
the Peace Conference to statesmen who have not perceived 
the moral significance of the struggle, and who are not pre- 
pared to make a people's peace. We want to replace the ma- 
terial force of arms by the moral force of right in the gov- 
ernment of the world. For that great task of the immediate 
future we want national leaders who are not only responsive 
to the inspirations of democracy, but who are qualified to 
guide the mighty energies of democracy in the task of build- 
ing up the new social order. 

Never before have the people been confronted with prob- 
lems of greater magnitude, international and national, 
economic and political, social and personal; but never have 
they had so good an opportunity of taking hold of these 
problems for themselves. The policies and programs of the 
orthodox parties have little relevance to the new situation. 
Political parties bound by tradition, saturated with class 
prejudice, out of touch with the living movements of thought 
and feeling among the people, cannot easily adapt themselves 
to the changed conditions, the new demands, the wider vision 
to which the war has given rise. The party of the future, upon 
which the chief tasks of reconstruction will devolve, will be 
the one which derives directly from the people themselves, 
and has been made the organ of the people's will, the voice 
of all the people — of both sexes and all classes — who work 
by hand or brain. Through such a party led by democratic- 
ally chosen leaders who have proved their fidelity to prin- 
ciple and their faith in the people's cause, the best spirits 
of our time will be able to work as they have never been 
able to work in the orthodox parties of the past. Nothing 
but disunity and divided counsels in the democratic move- 
ment can wreck the promise of the future. For every man 
and woman who believes in democracy and who desires to 
see a new birth of freedom in this land there is a place in the 
people's movement and a well-defined work to do. Despite 
the vast complications of our task the duty of Christian 
citizenship has never been so clearly marked. In the past 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 133 

the democratic effort has been weak because it has been 
divided. During the war we have learnt the meaning of co- 
operation for common ends. The lesson holds good for the 
politics of to-morrow. 

In a wider sense than has hitherto been understood the 
politics of the future will be human politics, and the domi- 
nating party will be the party of the common people and of 
democracy. This is certain. The people will have it so, for 
the people are weary of wars. They have borne too long the 
inequalities and injustices inherent in an economic system 
based on competition instead of co-operation. They are 
coming together in a more powerfully organized movement 
to achieve a new freedom, and to establish on this earth, 
drenched with men's blood, torn with men's struggles, wet 
with human tears, a fairer ideal of life. 



(e) "THE FEDERATION OF THE WORLD" 

WINSTON CHURCHILL: THE DECLARATION OF IN- 
DEPENDENCE AND THE WAR (July 4, 1918.) 

We are, as the Chairman has stated, met here to-day in the 
City of Westminster to celebrate the hundred and forty- 
second anniversary of American Independence. We are met 
also, as he has reminded you, as brothers in arms, facing to- 
gether grave injuries and perils, and passing through a 
period of exceptional anxiety and suffering. Therefore we 
seek to draw from the past history of our race inspiration and 
encouragement which will cheer our hearts and fortify and 
purify our resolution and our comradeship. A great harmony 
exists between the Declaration of Independence and all we 
are fighting for now. A similar harmony exists between the 
principles of that Declaration and what the British Empire 
has wished to stand for and has at last achieved, not only 
here at home, but In the great self-governing Dominions 
through the world. The Declaration of Independence is not 
only an American document; it follows on Magna Charta 
and the Petition of Right as the third of the great title deeds 
on which the liberties of the English-speaking race are 
founded. By it we lost an Empire, but by it we also pre- 



134 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

served an Empire. By applying these principles and learning 
this lesson we have maintained unbroken communion with 
those powerful Commonwealths which our children have 
founded and have developed beyond the seas, and which, 
in this time of stress, have rallied spontaneously to our aid. 
The political conceptions embodied in the Declaration of 
Independence are the same as those which were consistently 
expressed at the time by Lord Chatham and Mr. Burke and 
by many others who had in turn received them from John 
Hampden and Algernon Sidney. They spring from the same 
source; they come from the same well of practical truth, 
and that well, ladies and gentlemen, is here, by the banks of 
the Thames In this famous Island, which we have guarded 
all these years, and which is the birthplace and the cradle 
of the British and the American race. It is English wisdom, 
it is that peculiar political sagacity and sense of practical 
truth, which animates the great document in the minds of all 
Americans to-day. Wherever men seek to frame polities 
or constitutions which are intended to safeguard the citizen, 
be he rich or be he poor, on the one hand from the shame of 
despotism, on the other from the misery of anarchy, which 
are devised to combine personal liberty with respect for law 
and love of country — wherever these desires are sincerely 
before the makers of constitutions or laws, it is to this original 
inspiration, this inspiration which was the product of English 
soil, which was the outcome of the Anglo-Saxon mind, that 
they will Inevitably be drawn. 

We therefore feel no sense of division In celebrating this 
anniversary. We join in perfect sincerity and in perfect 
simplicity with our American kith and kin In commemorating 
the auspicious and glorious establishment of their nation- 
hood. We also, we British who have been so long in the 
struggle, also express our joy and gratitude for the mighty 
and timely aid which America has brought and Is bringing 
to the Allied Cause. When I have seen during the last few 
weeks the splendor of American manhood striding forward 
on all the roads of France and Flanders, I have experienced 
emotions which words cannot describe. We have suffered 
so much in this country — and in gallant France they have 
suffered still more — that we can feel for others. There are 
few homes in Britain where you will not find an empty 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 135 

chair and aching hearts, and we feel in our own sorrow a 
profound sympathy with those across the Atlantic whose 
dear ones have traveled so far to face dangers we know only 
too well. Not British hearts only, but Canadian, Australian, 
New Zealand, and South African hearts [A voice: "And 
Indian, too"] beat in keen common sympathy with them. 
And Indian hearts as well. All who have come across the 
great expanses of the ocean to take part in this conflict feel 
in an especial degree a sympathy, an Intense and compre- 
hending sympathy, with the people of the United States, 
who have to wait through these months of anxiety for the 
news of battle. 

The greatest actions of men or of nations are spontaneous 
and instinctive. They do not result from nice calculations of 
profit and loss, or long balancing of doubtful opinions. 
They happen as if they could not help happening. The heart, 
as the French say, has reasons which the reason does not 
know. I am persuaded that the finest and worthiest moment 
in the history of Britain was reached on that August night, 
now nearly four years ago, when we declared war on Ger- 
many. Little could we know where it would carry us, or what 
it would bring to us. Like the United States, we entered the 
war a peaceful nation, utterly unprepared for aggression 
in any form; like the United States, we entered the war 
without counting the cost, and without seeking any reward 
of any kind. The cost has been more terrible than our most 
sombre expectations would have led us to imagine, but the 
reward which is coming is beyond the fondest dreams and 
hopes we could have cherished. 

What is the reward of Britain.'* What is the priceless, 
utterly unexpected reward that is coming to us surely and 
irresistibly in consequence of our unstudied and unhesitating 
response to the appeals of Belgium and of France.'' Territory, 
indemnities, commercial advantages — what are they.'' They 
are matters utterly subordinate to the moral issues and 
moral consequences of this war. Deep in the hearts of the 
people of this Island, deep In the hearts of those whom the 
Declaration of Independence styles "our British brethren," 
lay the desire to be truly reconciled before all men and before 
all history with their kindred across the Atlantic Ocean; to 
blot out the reproaches and redeem the blunders of a bygone 



136 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

age, to dwell once more in spirit with our kith and kin, to 
stand once more in battle at their side, to create once more a 
true union of hearts, to begin once more to write a history in 
common. That was our heartfelt desire, but it seemed utterly- 
unattainable — utterly unattainable, at any rate, in periods 
which the compass of our short lives enabled us to consider. 
One prophetic voice ^ predicted with accents of certitude the 
arrival of a day of struggle which would find England and the 
United States in battle side by side; but for most of us it 
seemed that this desire of union and of reconciliation in 
sentiment and in heart would not be achieved within our 
lifetime. But it has come to pass. It has come to pass already, 
and every day it is being emphasized and made more real and 
more lasting! However long the struggle may be, however 
cruel may be the sufferings we have to undergo, however 
complete may be the victory we shall win, however great 
may be our share In It, we seek no nobler reward than that. 
We seek no higher reward than this supreme reconciliation. 
That is the reward of Britain. That is the lion's share. 

A million American soldiers are In Europe. They have ar- 
rived safely and in the nick of time. Side by side with their 
French and British comrades, they await at this moment the 
furious onslaught of the common foe, and that is an event 
which in the light of all that has led up to it, and In the light 
of all that must follow from It, seems — I say It frankly — to 
transcend the limits of purely mundane things. It Is a won- 
derful event; it Is a prodigious event; it is almost a miraculous 
event. It fills us. It fills me, with a sense of the deepest awe. 
Amid the carnage and confusion of the Immense battlefield, 
amid all the grief and destruction which this war is causing 
and has still to cause, there comes over even the most 
secularly-minded of us a feeling that the world is being 
guided through all this chaos to something far better than 
we have ever yet enjoyed. We feel in the presence of a great 
design of which we only see a small portion, but which is 
developing and unfolding swiftly at this moment, and of 
which we are the honored servants and the necessary in- 
struments In our own generation. No event, I say, since the 
beginning of the Christian era has been more likely to 
strengthen and restore faith in the moral governance of the 

^ Admiral Sims. 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 137 

Universe than the arrival from the other end of the world of 
these mighty armies of deliverance. One has a feeling that 
it is not all a blind struggle; it is not all for nothing. Not too 
late is the effort; not in vain do heroes die. 

There is one more thing I ought to say, and it is a grave 
thing to say. The essential purposes of this war do not admit 
of compromise. If we were fighting merely for territorial 
gains, or were engaged in a domestic, dynastic, or commer- 
cial quarrel, no doubt these would be matters to be adjusted 
by bargaining. But this war has become an open conflict 
between Christian civilization and scientific barbarism. The 
line is clearly drawn between the nations where the peoples 
own the governments and the nations where the govern- 
ments own the peoples. Our struggle is between systems 
which faithfully endeavor to quell and quench the brutish, 
treacherous, predatory promptings of human nature, and a 
system which has deliberately fostered, organized, armed, 
and exploited these promptings to its own base aggrandize- 
ment. We are all erring mortals. No race, no country, no 
individual, has a monopoly of good or of evil, but face to 
face with the facts of this war, who can doubt that the strug- 
gle in which we are engaged is In reality a struggle between 
the forces of good and the forces of evil.^ It is a struggle 
between right and wrong, and as such it is not capable of any 
solution which is not absolute. Germany must be beaten; 
Germany must know that she is beaten; Germany must feel 
that she is beaten. Her defeat must be expressed in terms and 
facts which will, for all time, deter others from emulating 
her crime, and will safeguard us against their repetition. 

But, Ladies and Gentlemen, the German people have at 
any rate this assurance: that we claim for ourselves no nat- 
ural or fundamental right that we shall not be obliged and 
even willing in all circumstances to secure for them. We can- 
not treat them as they have treated Alsace-Lorraine or 
Belgium or Russia, or as they would treat us all if they had 
the power. We cannot do it, for we are bound by the prin- 
ciples for which we are fighting. We must adhere to those 
principles. They will arm our fighting strength, and they 
alone will enable us to use with wisdom and with justice the 
victory which we shall gain. Whatever the extent of our 
victory, these principles will protect the German people. 



138 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

The Declaration of Independence and all that it implies 
must cover them. When all those weapons in which German 
militarists have put their trust have broken in their hands, 
when all the preparations on which they have lavished the 
energies and the schemes of fifty years have failed them, the 
German people will find themselves protected by those 
simple elemental principles of right and freedom against 
which they will have warred so long in vain. So let us cele- 
brate to-day not only the Declaration of Independence, but 
let us proclaim the true comradeship of Britain and America 
and their determination to stand together until the work is 
done, in all perils, in all difficulties, at all costs, wherever the 
war may lead us, right to the very end. No compromise on 
the main purpose; no peace till victory; no pact with un- 
repentant wrong — that is the Declaration of July 4th, 191 8; 
that is the Declaration which I invite you to make in com- 
mon with me, and, to quote the words which are on every 
American's lips to-day, "for the support of this Declaration, 
with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, 
we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and 
our sacred honor." 

VISCOUNT GREY: THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 

(May, 1918.) 

There are projects that exist in a shadowy form in an 
atmosphere of tepid idealism, admired by those who see 
that if possible they would be desirable. From time to time 
an attempt is made to embody them in material form and 
make them of practical use in national or international 
politics. It is then discovered that what appeared as an 
ideal to be wholly desirable and amiable cannot be of prac- 
tical use, unless we are ready to subject ourselves to some 
limitations or discipline that may be inconvenient, and 
unless we are prepared to overcome some difficulties that 
were not at first sight apparent. The ideal is found to have 
in fact a stern and disagreeable as well as an easy and amiable 
side to it. Thereupon a storm beats against it; those who 
never thought it desirable — for there are intellects to which 
most ideals seem dangerous and temperaments to which 
they are offensive — and who had previously treated it only 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 139 

with contempt in the abstract, offer the fiercest opposition 
to it as a practical proposal: many of its supporters are 
paralyzed by the difficult aspects of it, which they had not 
previously considered, and the project recedes again into 
the region of shadows or abstract resolutions. 

This, or something like this, has hitherto been the history 
of the ideal that has now become associated with the phrase 
"A League of Nations"; but it does not follow that the 
history of this or of other ideals will be the same after the 
war as before it. There is more at stake in this war than the 
existence of individual States or Empires, or the fate of a 
Continent; the whole of modern civilization is at stake, and 
whether it will perish and be submerged, as has happened to 
previous civilizations of older types, or whether it will live 
and progress, depends upon whether the nations engaged in 
this war, and even those that are onlookers, learn the lessons 
that the experience of the war may teach them. It must 
be with nations as with individuals; in the great trials of 
life they must become better or worse — they cannot stand 
still. They must learn and profit by experience and rise to 
greater heights, or else sink lower and drop eventually into 
the abyss. And this war is the greatest trial of which there is 
any record in history. If the war does not teach mankind new 
lessons that will so dominate the thought and feeling of 
those who survive it, and those who succeed the survivors, as 
to make new things possible, then the war will be the great- 
est catastrophe as well as the most grievous trial and suffer- 
ing of which mankind has any record. 

Therefore it does not follow that a League of Nations to 
secure the peace of the world will remain impossible because 
it has not been possible hitherto, and I propose in this paper 
to consider shortly, to state rather than to examine (for it 
would take a long time to examine thoroughly), the condi- 
tions that have not been present before and that are present 
now, or may soon be present, and that are essential if the 
League of Nations is to become effective. These conditions 
appear to me to be as follows: 

I. The idea must be adopted with earnestness and con- 
viction by the Executive Heads of States. It must become an 
essential part of their practical policy, one of their chief 
reasons for being or continuing to be responsible for the 



140 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

policy of their States. They must not adopt it only to render 
lip service to other persons, whom it is inconvenient or un- 
gracious to displease. They must lead, and not follow; they 
must compel if necessary, and not be compelled. 

This condition was not present before the war; to what 
extent is it present now.^* It is not possible to answer this 
question fully, but it can be answered certainly and affirma- 
tively as regards President Wilson, the Executive Plead of 
the United States, and this alone is sufficient to give new life 
and purpose to the idea of a League of Nations. President 
Wilson and his country have had in this matter the great 
advantage of having been for more than two years and a half, 
before April, 1917, able to observe the war as neutrals, free 
from the intense anxiety and effort that absorb all the 
thought and energy of belligerents. They were able not only 
to observe, but to reflect and to draw conclusions. One of the 
conclusions has been that, if the world of which they form 
an important part is to be saved from what they consider 
disaster, they must enter the war against Germany; another 
has been that, if national liberty and peace are to be secure in 
future, there must be a League of Nations to secure them. It 
must not be supposed from this that the Governments of the 
Allies are less ready to draw, or have not already drawn, the 
same conclusion from the experience of the war; but their 
countries have been at war all the time. They have been 
fighting. It Is true, for the same Ideal of national and human 
liberty as the United States, but fighting also for the im- 
m.edlate preservation of national existence In Europe, and 
all their thought and energy have been concentrated upon 
resistance to Imminent peril. Nevertheless, In this country 
at any rate, the project of a League of Nations has met with 
widespread and cordial acceptance. On the other hand, the 
military party in Germany are, and must remain, opposed 
to it; they resent any limitation upon the use of force by 
Germany as fatal to German interests, for they can conceive 
no development, and even no security, except one based 
solely upon force. Any other conception Is fatal, and this 
exclusive conception is essential to the maintenance of the 
power of the military party In Germany. As long, therefore, 
as this rule in Germany continues, Germany will oppose a 
League of Nations. Nothing will change this except a con- 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 141 

viction in the German people that the use of force causes at 
least as much suffering to themselves as to others, and that 
security based upon law and treaty and a sense of mutual 
advantage is better than the risks, dangers, and sufferings of 
a will to supreme power and efforts to obtain it; and this 
conviction must so work upon them as to displace the mili- 
tary party and their policy and ideals from power in Ger- 
many, 

The situation, therefore, of this first condition essential to 
make the League of Nations practical may be summed up as 
follows: It is present certainly as regards the Executive Head 
of the United States, which is potentially the strongest and 
actually the least exhausted of all the belligerent States: it 
either is or will at the end of the war be found to be present 
as regards the Governments of other countries fighting on 
the same side as the United States. Even among their enemies 
Austria has publicly shown a disposition to accept the pro- 
posal, and probably welcomes it genuinely though secretly as 
a safeguard for her future, not only against old enemies, but 
against Prussian domination. 

All small States, belligerent or neutral, must naturally 
desire in their own interest everything that will safeguard 
small States as v/ell as great from aggression and war. 

There remains the opposition of Germany, where recent 
military success and the ascendancy of Prussian militarism 
have reduced the advocates of anything but force to silence. 
Germany has to be convinced that force does not pay, that 
the aims and policy of her military rulers inflict intolerable 
and also unnecessary suffering upon her; and that when the 
world is free from the menace of these military rulers, with 
their sharp swords, shining armor, and mailed fists, Germany 
will find peaceful development assured and preferable to 
expansion by war, and will realize that the condition of true 
security for one nation is a sense of security on the part of all 
nations. Till Germany feels this to be true, there can be no 
League of Nations in the sense Intended by President Wilson, 
A League such as he desires must include Germany, and 
should include no nation that is not thoroughly convinced 
of the advantage and necessity of such a League, and is 
therefore not prepared to make the efforts, and, if need be, 
the sacrifices necessary to maintain it. 



142 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

2. The second condition essential to the foundation and 
maintenance of a League of Nations Is that the Governments 
and Peoples of the States willing to found It understand 
clearly that it will Impose some limitation upon the national 
action of each, and may entail some inconvenient obligation. 
The smaller and weaker nations will have rights that must 
be respected and upheld by the League. The stronger nations 
must forgo the right to make their interests prevail against 
the weaker by force: and all the States must forgo the right 
In any dispute to resort to force before other methods of 
settlement by conference, conciliation, or, If need be, arbi- 
tration, have been tried. This is the limitation. 

The obligation is that if any nation will not observe this 
limitation upon Its national action; if it breaks the agreement 
which is the basis of the League, rejects all peaceful methods 
of settlement and resorts to force, the other nations must one 
and all use their combined force against it. The economic 
pressure that such a League could use would in itself be very 
powerful, and the action of some of the smaller States com- 
posing the League could perhaps not go beyond economic 
pressure, but those States that have power must be ready to 
use all the force, economic, military, or naval, that they 
possess. It must be clearly understood and accepted that 
defection from or violation of the agreement by one or more 
States does not absolve all or any of the others from the 
obligation to enforce the agreement. 

Anything less than this Is of no value. How worthless it 
may be can be seen by reading the debate In the House of 
Lords in 1867 upon the Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of 
Luxemburg. It was there explained that we entered only 
into a collective guarantee; by this it was apparently meant 
that If any one of the guaranteeing Powers violated the 
neutrality of Luxemburg, or even if any one of them de- 
clined to take active steps to defend It, Great Britain and 
the other guarantors were thereby absolved from taking any 
action whatever. This was contrasted at the time with the 
Belgian Treaty, which entailed a separate guarantee. 

Hitherto the Nations of the world have made reserves in 
Arbitration or Conciliation agreements, showing that they 
were not prepared to accept the limitations upon national 
action that are essential to secure an eifective League of 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 143 

Nations. An exception is the Conciliation Treaty between 
Great Britain and the United States negotiated before the 
war, but the statement made above is generally true. 

The Nations have also carefully abstained from under- 
taking any obligation to use force to uphold the benevolent 
rules and agreements of general application that have been 
recorded at Hague Conferences; such obligation has been 
confined to local objects like the Neutrality of Belgium or to 
alliances between particular Powers made to protect or 
serve their special interests. 

Are the Nations of the world prepared now, or will they 
be ready after this war, to look steadily and clearly at this 
aspect of the League of Nations, at the limitations and 
obligations that it will impose, and to say whole-hearted and 
convinced as they have never been before, "We will accept 
and undertake them".^ 

Individuals in civilized States have long ago accepted an 
analogous limitation and obligation as regards disputes 
between individuals; these are settled by law, and any in- 
dividual who, instead of appealing to law, resorts to force 
to give effect to what he considers his rights, finds himself at 
once opposed and restrained by the force of the State — that 
is, in democratic countries, by the combined force of the 
other individuals. And we not only accept this arrangement, 
but uphold it as essential to prevent oppression of one by 
another, to secure each person in a quiet life, and to guar- 
antee to each the greatest liberty that is consistent with the 
equal liberty of neighbors. That at any rate is part of the 
theory and object of democratic government, and If it is not 
perfectly attained most of the proposals for improving it 
look rather to increased than to diminished State control. 

But in less civilized parts of the world individuals have 
not reached the point of view from which this order of things 
seems desirable. There is a story of a native chief in Africa, 
who protested to a British official against having to pay any 
taxes. The British official explained, no doubt in the best 
modern manner, that these taxes were used to keep order in 
the country, with the result that men and women and the 
flocks and herds and possessions of every tribe were safe, and 
each could live in its own territory without fear or dis- 
turbance, and that the payment of taxes was for the good of 



144 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

all. The effect of this explanation was to make the chief very 
angry. Before the British came, he said, he could raid a 
neighbor, return with captives and captures of all sorts and 
be received in triumph by the women and the rest of his 
tribe when he returned. The need for protecting his own 
tribe from similar raids he was willing to undertake himself. 
"Now," he said, "you come here and tell me that I ought to 
like to pay taxes to be prevented from doing this, and that 
makes me mad." 

The analogy between States and individuals or groups of 
individuals is not perfect, but there is sufficient analogy to 
make it not quite irrelevant to ask, whether after this war 
the view held by great States of the relations desirable 
between themselves will be that of the African chief or that 
of individuals in what we call civilized Nations. Nothing but 
experience convinced individuals that law was better than 
anarchy to settle the relations between themselves. And the 
sanction that maintains law is the application of force with 
the support of the great majority of individuals behind it. 
Is it possible that the experience of this war will produce a 
settled opinion of the same sort to regulate the relations of 
States with each other and safeguard the world from war, 
which is in fact anarchy.^ 

What does the experience of this war amount to.^* Our 
minds cannot grasp it all. Thought is crushed by the accu- 
mulated suffering that the war has caused and is still causing. 
We cannot utter all that we feel, and if it were not that our 
feelings are in a way stunned by the very violence of the 
catastrophe, as physical nerves are to some extent numbed 
by great blows, the human heart could not bear up and live 
under the trial of this war. Great must be the effect of all 
this : greater after even than during the war on the working 
of men's minds, and on human nature itself; but this is not 
what I intend to urge here. I will urge only one point and one 
that is for the head rather than the heart. 

We are now in the fourth year of the war: the application 
of scientific knowledge and the inventions of science during 
the war have made it more and more terrible and destruc- 
tive each year. The Germans have abrogated all previously 
accepted rules of warfare. The use of poisonous gas, the 
firing from the sea upon open undefended towns, the in- 



THE BRITISH EMPIRE 145 

discriminate bombing of big cities from the air were all 
introduced into the war by Germany, It was long before the 
Allies adopted any of these practices even as reprisals; but 
the Germans have forced a ruthless and unlimited appli- 
cation of scientific discovery to the destruction of human 
life, combatant and noncombatant. They have shown the 
world that now and henceforth war means this and nothing 
less than this. If there is to be another war in twenty or 
thirty years' time, what will it be like? If there is to be con- 
centrated preparation for more war, the researches of science 
will be devoted henceforth to discovering methods by which 
the human race can be destroyed. These discoveries cannot 
be confined to one nation and their object of wholesale de- 
struction will be much more completely achieved hereafter 
even than in this war. The Germans are not blind to this, 
but as far as I can see their rulers propose to avoid future 
wars by establishing the domination of Germany for ever. 
Peace can never be secured by the domination of one country 
securing its power and prosperity by the submission and 
disadvantage of others, and the German idea of a world 
peace secured by the power of German militarism is im- 
practicable as well as unfair and abhorrent to other Nations. 
It is as intolerable and impossible in the world as despotism 
would be here or in the United States. In opposition to this 
idea of Germany, the Allies should set forth, as President 
Wilson has already set forth, the idea of a peace secured by 
mutual regard between States for the rights of each and a 
determination to stamp out any attempt at war, as they 
would a plague that threatened the destruction of all. 

When those who accept this idea and this sort of peace 
can in word and deed speak for Germany, we shall be within 
sight of a good peace. 

The establishment and maintenance of a League of Na- 
tions, such as President Wilson has advocated, is more im- 
portant and essential to a secure peace than any of the actual 
terms of peace that may conclude the war: It will transcend 
them all. The best of them will be worth little, unless the 
future relations of States are to be on a basis that will pre- 
vent a recurrence of militarism In any State. 

"Learn by experience or suflFer" Is the rule of life. We have 
all of us seen individuals becoming more and more a misery 



146 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

to themselves and others, because they cannot understand 
or will not accept this rule. Is it not applicable to Nations as 
well? And if so, have not Nations come to a great crisis in 
which for them the rule "Learn or perish" will prove in- 
exorable? All must learn the lesson of this war. The United 
States and the Allies cannot save the world from militarism 
unless Germany learns the lesson thoroughly and com- 
pletely; and they will not save the world, or even themselves, 
by complete victory over Germany until they too have 
learnt and can apply the lesson that militarism has become 
the deadly enemy of mankind. 



4 



V. ITALY 

The shabby political compromises forced upon Italy be- 
tween 1870 and 1914 by external pressure and internal vested 
interests served to disguise the constant aspiration of the 
people after freedom and unfettered nationality. In the 
Address to the Italians, produced at the close of his long 
career, Mazzini (i 805-1 872) packed the ripest fruit of that 
democratic idealism which in 1848 had made Italy the leader 
in the cause of Continental liberty. Few things have been 
written which focus more wisdom upon two subjects of 
paramount present-day importance: the brotherhood of 
nations and the proper mean between autocracy and bol- 
shevism. 

The particular obstacle to Italian freedom, both in internal 
and in international affairs, has been Austria. Mr. Roselli 
pictures with special reference to what was till lately "Italia 
Irredenta" the character of the tyranny which in Mazzini's 
time afflicted also Milan, Brescia, and Venice. 



(a) DEMOCRATIC ASPIRATIONS 
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI: TO THE ITALIANS (1871) 

We believe that to make politics an art, and sever them from 
morality, as the royal statesmen and diplomatists desired, is 
a sin before God and destructive to the peoples. The end of 
politics is the application of the moral Law to the civil 
constitution of a Nation in its double activity, domestic and 
foreign. The end of economics is the application of the same 
Law to the organization of Labor in its double aspect, pro- 
duction and distribution. All that makes for that end is 
Good and must be promoted; all that contradicts it or gives 
it no help must be opposed till it succumb. People and 
Government must proceed united, like thought and action 

147 



148 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

in individuals, towards the accomplishment of that mission. 
And what is true for one Nation is true as between Nations. 
Nations are the individuals of Humanity. The internal 
national organization is the instrument with which the Na- 
tion accomplishes its mission in the world. Nationalities are 
sacred, and providentially constituted to represent, within 
Humanity, the division or distribution of labor for the ad- 
vantage of the peoples, as the division and distribution of 
labor within the limits of the state should be organized for 
the greatest benefit of all the citizens. If they do not look 
to that end they are useless and fall. If they persist in evil, 
which is egotism, they perish: nor do they rise again unless 
they make Atonement and return to Good. 

But to staunch the two sources of our worst wounds — the 
dissension between the Government and the governed, and 
the selfishness that dominates individuals, — we must con- 
stitute a Government that represents the mind, the tend- 
encies, the duties of the Nation, and we must determine 
the National ideal, the origin and standard of our duties. 
The former is a problem of form to be solved, in any prac- 
tical way, by the initiative of the whole country; the latter 
must be solved by the delegates of the nation, who shall 
make a NATIONAL CONTRACT, and found a system of 
national and compulsory Public Education, which the 
Contract shall determine. 

For both, the preliminary and essential question, is to 
recognize and proclaim where the Sovereignty resides. 

Two schools, both foreign, both founded on that dis- 
memberment of the unity of human nature to which we 
have drawn attention, now hold the field, and solve in 
their several ways the philosophico-religious, political, and 
economic questions that are exciting interest in Europe, 

The first places sovereignty in the individual, in the Ega. 
With no conception of Law, and hence none of collective 
duty, it finds, wherever it turns, a partial, temporary ex- 
pression of life, the doctrine of Rights supreme, inviolable; it 
bases all organization on this latter doctrine. The sponta- 
neous action of the individual, whether it leads to a power 
that Is only de facto, or whether it instinctively reaches a 
standard of justice and truth, always bears, in its eyes, the 
mark of a Sovereignty. According to the disciples of this 



ITALY * 149 

school, self-interest, or if that be insufficient, the action of 
the preponderant force, is sufficient to prevent the inevitable 
conflicts among all these petty local sovereignties from 
degenerating into civil war. This school leads, in Religion, 
to protestantism with the more timid, who stop halfway; to 
materialism with those whose logic is more thorough. In 
politics it leads to federalism^ to the almost absolute inde- 
pendence of local interests, to absolute liberty of education, 
to systematic distrust of all governmental control, and in 
international life to non-intervention. In economics it leads 
to unlimited competition, to the recognition of every acquired 
right without considering whether it Is fatal to the progress 
of the majority, to the unrestricted doctrine of laissezfaire. 
It accepts liberty alone among human faculties as the basis 
of civil society. The State is regarded as merely an aggrega- 
tion of individuals, without any common ideal except the 
satisfaction of personal interests; the Nation as an aggrega- 
tion of Communes, all sovereign and arbiters of their own 
development; and Government as a necessary evil, to be 
limited as much as possible, and confined to the exercise of a 
coercive force in cases of mutual robbery or slaughter. 

The other School Is opposed to the first on every point. 
It places sovereignty exclusively in the collective will, in the 
*'We," and inevitably concentrates it slowly in the hands of a 
few, if not of a single man. The State Is everything: the 
individual practically nothing. The social Ideal Is absolutely 
binding, and must be accepted by him. The Nation absorbs 
all independent local life In a strong centralized government. 
The Ideal that directs the Nation Is supposed, theoretically, 
to be founded on the good; practically it Is neither confirmed, 
nor elaborated, nor modified by the intervention of the free 
examination or consent of the citizens. According to their 
system, the best are, and ought to be, called to apply it, but 
not by the people; they, the majority at least, have no part 
in the choice of the few who are already declared to be the 
most capable of the nation. Association Is predetermined and 
ordained; but by authority and on a uniform and fixed plan. 
The instruments of Labor and Production are one by one 
handed over to the State. The conditions of distribution are 
decided by authority. This school leads, in religion, to Cathol- 
icism with the timid; to Pantheism with the strong-minded. 



ISO WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

In politics it leads to despotism, whether of one, or a few, or 
many, is immaterial. In economics it leads to the search — the 
probably fruitless search — for a limited degree of material 
prosperity, at the cost of all possibility of progress or of 
increased production, at the cost of every stimulus to the 
growth of activity, the inventiveness, the initiative of the 
individuals. Just as Liberty is everything to the former 
School, so is Authority to this. 

We reject those two Schools, which, under whatever name 
they appear, only continue the dualism of the doctrine which 
we declare dead. The republican form of government, as we 
understand it, places the center of movement in a higher 
sphere, in which the two much-abused terms. Liberty and 
Authority, shall not conflict, but harmonize with one an- 
other. 

The problem that is agitating the world is not the rejection 
of authority, for without authority moral anarchy, and 
therefore sooner or later material anarchy, are inevitable. 
It is the rejection of all lifeless authority which is founded 
on the mere fact of its existence in the past, or on privileges 
of birth, riches, or aught else, and maintained without the 
free discussion and assent of the citizens, and closed to all 
progress in the future. It is not the rejection of liberty, whose 
absence makes tyranny inevitable. It is the restoration of the 
idea contained in that word to its true meaning — the power to 
choose^ according to our tendencies, capacity, and circumstances y 
the means to be employed to reach the end. It is the rejection of 
that liberty which is an end to itself, and which abandons 
society and the mission of humanity to the caprice of the 
impulses and passions of individuals. Authority and Liberty, 
conceived as we state them, are equally sacred to us, and 
should be reconciled in every question awaiting settlement. 
All things in Liberty and for Association; this is the republican 
formula. Liberty and Association, Conscience and Tradition, 
Individual and Nation, the "/" and the ''We'' are insep- 
arable elements of human nature, all of them essential to its 
orderly development. Only in order to co-ordinate them and 
direct them to a purpose, some point of union is required 
which is superior to all. Hence practical necessity leads us 
inevitably back to the high principles that we enunciated in 
theory in an earlier part of our work. 



ITALY 151 

Sovereignty exists neither in the "/" nor the "/iT^"; it 
exists in God, the source of Life; in the PROGRESS that 
defines life; in the Moral Law that defines Duty. 

In other terms, Sovereignty is in the IDEAL. We are called 
to do its work. 

The knowledge of the ideal is given to us — so far as it is 
understood by the age in which we live — by our intelligence 
when it is inspired by the love of Good, and proceeds from 
the Tradition of Humanity to question its own conscience^ 
and reconciles these two sole criteria of Truth. 

But the knowledge of the ideal needs an interpreter who 
may forthwith indicate the means that may best attain to 
it, and direct its application to the various branches of 
activity. And as this interpreter must embrace within itself 
the "/" and the "/iT^," Authority and Liberty, State and 
Individual; and as, moreover, it must be progressive, it 
cannot be a man or any order of men selected by chance, or 
by the prerogative of a privilege unprogressive by its very 
nature, or birth, or riches, or aught else. Given the principles 
contained in the contract of faith and brotherhood, this 
interpreter can only be the People, the Nation. 



(b) THE CASE AGAINST AUSTRIA 

BRUNO ROSELLI: ITALY'S UNREDEEMED CHILDREN 

(April, 19 1 7.) 

The first irredento, or unredeemed Italian, with whom I ever 
came in contact was old Professor Dante Maccher, who 
taught me physics in college. He was a hopeless teacher, and 
my scientific debt of gratitude to him is meager indeed. But 
if I am a good marksman — and it looks as if that would soon 
turn out to be a useful accomplishment — I owe it to him; 
because he loved target-shooting much more than the 
teaching of science, and it was notorious that any student 
who could not understand physics was sure of an excellent 
grade if he only knew how to shoot well. The professor made 
no secret of this criterion; and during the exciting days of an 
intercollegiate rifle-shooting contest, he would stand by us 
as we were putting the cartridge-carrier into the magazine, 



152 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

and say: "Remember that all your knowledge of ballistics 
will not be worth a soldo if you can't drive those six bullets 
home!" 

We used to laugh at this example of senile belligerency; 
now we laugh no more. You may remember that all England 
used to laugh in much the same spirit at another old man, 
whose name was Lord Roberts; and she also has since 
learned not to laugh. Professor Maccher is now seventy- 
two, and a lieutenant of Italian engineers at the front. I have 
no doubt that Italy need not regret having added his name 
to the glorious list of those veterans — irredenti or national- 
ists — whose enthusiasm was such that they simply could 
not be left at home because of old age, and are actually 
sharing with their younger brothers the dangers and dis- 
comforts of Alpine warfare. 

From that time until recently, I have never had a chance 
to make a first-hand study of those elusive brothers of ours 
whom we fondly call irredenti. And this for various reasons: 
in their own lands, because they justly suspect a govern- 
ment spy or agent provocateur in any expansive stranger; in 
Italy, because — with the exception of political refugees — 
we used to see very few such people, since Austria dis- 
couraged their trips to the Motherland to the extent of 
frequently closing her frontiers forever to a Trentino or 
Triestino who went into Italy to study art or to complete his 
education; and in America, because, contrary to the usual 
custom of Italians there, I have always made it a point to 
cultivate primarily, if not exclusively, the society of Amer- 
icans. But ever since my last arrival in Italy I have seen 
so many of these war refugees as to make me wonder whether 
the statistics giving as barely one million the total Italian 
population of Austria-Hungary were not below, instead of 
above, the reality. Here at Vallombrosa the hotel lobbies, and 
the woods dear to John Milton, echo with the soft accents 
of that Venetian dialect which would seem to have been 
created merely to express joy; and groups of grave women 
and children walk between the rows of centennial firs lik;e a 
funeral procession advancing through the nave of an ancient 
cathedral. They are the irredenti — the homeless, long- 
suffering, wandering, voluntary exiles of the Italian provinces 
of Austria. 



ITALY 153 

Painfully panting, the funicular train which has climbed 
from sea level to three thousand feet pulls into the station. 
The conductor shouts "Viva!" and throws a bundle of news- 
papers to the several hundred people who have gathered 
around, having come from all over the mountain for the 
printed confirmation of an eagerly awaited piece of war 
news, received a few hours ago by telephone. Scores of people 
struggle to seize the precious sheets; and some, emerging 
with shreds of newspapers in their hands, read breathlessly 
the fateful words of the official war bulletin, in which General 
Cadorna, the most laconic of Italians, describes In six words 
the crowning achievement of fourteen months of warfare: 
*'To-day our troops have entered Gorlzla." 

There Is general shouting of ooohs and aaahs, the cheaper 
and equally noisy Italian substitute for fire-crackers; then 
the crowd returns to hotels and cottages, all talking at once. 
Everywhere In our hotel there Is an infernal din — everywhere 
but In the dimly lighted music-room, where the irredenti 
have gathered around an old gentleman who, with pure 
Venetian accent, reads slowly and with evident emotion the 
bulletin and the brief official comments. His listeners must be 
about twenty-five in number; only one man among them; 
the rest women, holding close to themselves their attentive 
children of various ages, as a mother (woman or animal) will 
always do in grave moments. When the old man finishes 
in a whisper, there Is no outward expression whatever of any 
feeling: no commentj no exclamation, no sigh. One lady 
weeps slowly. The children stare at the paper, with open 
mouths and blank expressions; all except one, who has 
caught up his own sailor hat, and is looking with wonder at 
the name "Gorlzia" printed upon it In golden letters. 
Finally the biggest of the children, who Is about thirteen, 
breaks the silence by asking aloud what the adult members 
of the group are all asking In their secret hearts: "And now, 
where will they go next.'*" His mother answers the question 
with a kiss. 

These irredenti are not all from the same city, or even 
province :Trento, Riva, Flume, Trieste, Zara, are represented 
here. Some of them are from noble families, and some from 
the merchant class. Two of the ladles use only the old Vene- 
tian dialect, and have considerable difficulty in understand- 



154 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Ing pure Italian. Six at least are Jews. Yet the great news 
has brought them all with one accord to this quiet corner 
of the hotel, where they can gather in church-like seclusion 
and meditation, and be away from the boisterous rejoicing 
of those who look upon the taking of Gorizia as they would 
look upon the taking of a foreign city, without realizing what 
horrors are involved in the re-taking hy force of a city friendly 
to the invader. 

Yes, what city will be the next.^ Where will it happen next 
that people of Italian blood and leanings, compelled to re- 
main in a town as a protection against the enemy's bom- 
bardment, will be killed by the shells of the army of libera- 
tion.'' What city will next suffer the insults, the looting, the 
outrages of the Austrian army which defends it, and which 
is well aware that every person in town is an unarmed 
enemy.'' Where next will the Austrians, before evacuating 
the city, dig well-concealed holes in the streets, in order that 
an Italian platoon may be precipitated upon bayonets set 
point up at the bottom of the trap.'* Where next will they 
place, behind half-closed doors, contact bombs ready to 
explode when the Italian soldiers appointed to search the 
houses open such doors.'' Where next will they loosen the 
supports of balconies so that anyone stepping forth to put 
out an Italian flag may fall into the street.'' What city will 
first be emptied of its remaining complement of growing 
boys and then set ablaze as soon as the military have evacu- 
ated it.'' Will it be Trcnto.'' The old man who is the center 
of the group built its light and power plant, its street rail- 
way, most of its modern factories. Will it be Riva.'' That 
young married woman with untimely white hair has her 
husband there, a professor of mathematics in the high school, 
who did not succeed in following his wife across the border. 
Will it be Trieste.'' That lady in deep mourning has there 
a splendid collection of old masters, which she did not dare 
sell before escaping, lest people should suspect the fact that 
she and her two sons of military age were about to run away 
into Italy, to give their services to hospital and field work. 

If you should ask these people whether they want their 
cities to be joined to the Motherland, they would all answer 
with a most emphatic and sincere "yes." But could you 
blame them if, when they heard that the Italian tricolor had 



ITALY 15s 

been hoisted upon the smoking ruins of Gorizia, they cher- 
ished in their hearts — without even daring to formulate it 
specifically — the hope that their own particular city would 
not be the next? 

The long conversations which I have held with these 
refugees, and the constant scrutiny to which I have sub- 
jected them, leave me entirely satisfied as to the Italianitd 
of the unredeemed, from no matter what province. I mean 
that their natures are Italian pure and unalloyed, and that 
their political leanings are genuinely, spontaneously, in 
favor of an uncompromising union with Italy. Mark you 
that their union with Austria was a complex aff"air, which 
gave some of their lands an outward look of political auton- 
omy. Thus the Austrian Emperor was not officially the 
Emperor, but merely the "Signore" of Trieste; the inland 
post and telegraph tariff" of the Italian provinces of Austria 
applied also to letters and telegrams addressed to certain 
parts of Italy; boys from the coastal districts, when of mili- 
tary age, were not incorporated into the regular Austrian 
army, but into special regiments of the national guard doing 
military duty only in their home cities. Yet I know that 
these ancient privileges and charters will be gladly torn up 
at the feet of United Italy, and that the descendants of a 
people whose bishops buried their flags under the main 
altars of the cathedrals when Napoleon sold their unwilling 
lands to Austria In 1797, are asking for no better lot than 
pure and simple incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy. 

One of the unredeemed ladles is being "paged." The 
waiter brings her a telegram, which she opens with ill- 
concealed emotion. "The scoundrels!" she cries out. Then, 
reading aloud: "Just notified through Switzerland all your 
property confiscated, your children condemned as deserters 
and traitors to death by hanging if caught. Accusations seem 
to have been proved by secret agent named Decarlo." 

"The train Inspector!" "The protege of our patriotic 
societies!" "The man who brought us the Italian news!" — 
From these exclamations It is evident that half the irredenti 
know him; the others are anxious to hear. The dispossessed 
lady explains, white-hot with rage: 

"You Trentini and Dalmatians can't know this hyena who 
thirsts for the blood of my children; but there is no real 



156 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Italian from Trieste or any nearby place who does not know 
that dog, son of a dog — may the most glorious Saint Mark 
curse him! He was a regnicolo,^ who came to us with a 
long story of persecution at the hands of his fellow towns- 
men from Apulia, who believed that he had the evil eye. 
We don't believe in the evil eye in Trieste; and when we 
found that he knew so many things which we had not been 
permitted to know about recent Italian history and politics, 
we opened our homes to him and flocked to hear him talk. 
He was soon admitted to all our athletic, choral, literary, 
and charitable clubs: and you know what that means in our 
city. He obtained all our passwords and all our secrets. 
Why, before leaving Trieste I even took the rascal to our 
family vault in the cemetery, and showed him the special 
empty tomb in which he was to hide (as so many Triestini 
afterwards did) and wait for the Italians, in case he could 
not escape," 

The lady sobbed, then bit her lip and continued: 
"We secured for him the delicate position of train inspec- 
tor on the Siidbahn express from Venice to Trieste. He was 
to bring us the news of Italy's gradual progress on the path 
leading to war. He must have made twenty thousand corone 
between the time when Austria went to war and the time 
when Italy joined the Allies. He would bring from Italy piles 
of the "Corriere della Sera" and other forbidden publica- 
tions, carefully concealed beneath the woodwork of the 
floor of a car. Each paper — or rather each reading without 
the privilege of keeping the sheet — cost three, four, finally 
five corone as the man's supposed risk grew. Each reading 
was to last half an hour at most, after which we were to 
give the paper to certain pseudo-pedlars who turned it over 
to somebody else. In addition, we had to pay large amounts 
of hush money: he had been found out, he would be hanged 
unless he gave huge sums to people higher up. And to think 
that all along he was probably selling our names and secrets 
to the police! He loved my two Titians: now they are prob- 
ably his. And how well I can remember his remark that 
every time he saw the broad stretch of the beautiful city 

' Word made by the Italians of Austria, from the word regno (kingdom); literally, 
one from a kingdom; actually, an Italian from the Kingdom of Italy, as opposed to 
irredento, an Italian from Austria. 



ITALY 157 

from our dining-room window, he wished he could do as 
Nero did, when he set Rome afire in order to see a devasta- 
tion of unequalled grandeur! O my poor city, he will have his 
wish, and we shall never see you again!" 

I wanted to go to the disconsolate lady, and say to her: 
"Why not try and forget your native city? You irredenti 
need not suffer so much. Why should a Trentino return to 
Trento, or a Triestino to Trieste, when the war is over, since 
nothing would await him there but horrible sights, smoking 
ruins, and the remembrance of days of uninterrupted sor- 
row? Why not begin life anew somewhere else — why not 
found somewhere else other cities by the same names, which 
may reproduce the appearance and the atmosphere of their 
namesakes, yet correct their most undesirable features?" 

But I saw that all my reasoning would be of no avail. 
That scheme seems plausible enough on paper; but it can 
never become a reality. Even if the new city were an im- 
provement on the old — who would care? It sounds like a 
paradox, but an Italian loves his city precisely because it is 
not what he would like it to be: any mother feels very much 
that way about her own child. An Italian city is not merely 
an assemblage of buildings warmed and hallowed by human 
life. It consists of structures laid by Pelasgians, beautified 
by Romans, destroyed by Huns, rebuilt by free republicans 
of the mediaeval communes, blood-stained by Renaissance 
tyrants, gilded over by the baroque civilization, turned into 
stables by Napoleon's cavalry and into power plants by our 
industrial age. Mythology, history, art, religion, poetry, 
spread over it protecting wings which no explosive shell can 
damage or put to flight. Pestilence, earthquake, fire, famine, 
war, are but pages in Its undying history; just as dams, em- 
bankments, artificial lakes, irrigation canals, and man- 
made waterfalls are but later chapters in the history of a 
river whose flow human beings can curb and divert, but not 
stop. Avezzano is being rebuilt almost exactly on the ruins 
created by last year's earthquake; and the new Messina 
rises only a few hundred yards from the houses whose 
collapse killed almost 100,000 of her Inhabitants. A similar 
fate of destruction and of resurrection on the same spot, 
hallowed by suffering, awaits the unredeemed cities. 

Before the marble tomb containing Dante's remains at 



158 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Ravenna, there was hung several years ago a golden lamp, 
which burns day and night. It was the gift of Trento, Trieste, 
Gorizia, Pola, and Zara, — the most violently Italian, per- 
haps, of all unredeemed cities; and it bears five massive 
figures of chained women, symbolizing the donors of this 
pledge of undying faith in the leadership of the divine poet. 
Yet each of these five cities, united in the abhorrence of the 
Austrian yoke, has a different racial, cultural, and even 
political problem to meet. The Austrian government, most 
astute in applying the rule of the divide et impera to its 
motley empire, so skilfully laid its plans that by a slow and 
steady process of denationalization it made great progress 
in its programme of strangling, without producing an open 
struggle, the Italianism of its Italian provinces. 

At the present time, the unredeemed provinces are divided 
into two separate zones by that portion of the Kingdom of 
Italy which is known as the Veneto. To its left is the Tren- 
tino, a deep wedge with its base at the Alps and its apex In 
the North Italian plain; to Its right are Istria and Dalmatia. 
If the farmers and mountaineers of the former zone, and the 
seafaring and commercial populations of the latter, had been 
able to come In touch with each other by means of common 
cultural organizations and of an Italian university, a uni- 
versity using only the Italian language, the results would 
have made Austria tremble. Therefore it was decided that 
the Trentino should be a satellite of Germany, and the 
Adriatic territory a satellite of that Near East towards which 
the Teutons have been pressing since the day when the 
"Drang-nach-Osten" cry was first uttered. German farmers 
were made to settle In the Trentino; many large German 
hotels were built there, extensively advertised In Berlin and 
Vienna, and patronized exclusively by Teutons; the TIroler 
Volksbund, the German and Austrian Schul-Vereins, the 
Alldeutscher Volksbund, dotted the country with free Ger- 
man schools and daily papers In German, and even gave 
substantial financial help to all impecunious Germans in the 
region. Furthermore, an iniquitous protective tariff prac- 
tically closed the Italian markets to all produce of the 
Trentino, and directed its course northward, making Ger- 
mans the only customers. 

A different fate befell the Adriatic lands. In those regions, 



ITALY 159 

where the Venetian Republic had left upon populations 
already Italian an unmistakable imprint evident in every 
detail of custom, speech, and architecture, the cities are 
still thoroughly Italian. But in the surrounding country, 
only the moneyed and cultured classes are Italian: the peas- 
ants are Slavs, who, however, owing to their inferior civiliza- 
tion, spoke, up to a few years ago, the Italian language and 
adopted the Italian customs. Austria, realizing that any 
attempt to introduce Germans there would fail, inaugurated 
the policy of striking the nationalist chord in the Slav 
peasantry, explaining to them that they were the equals of 
the Italians, and encouraging their languages and other 
forms of racial expression. When that was done, from the 
interior of the country, from beyond the Julian and Dalma- 
tian Alps, Austria brought to the Italian cities large numbers 
of Slav laborers, providing them with free transportation and 
with steady employment. The Italians did not immediately 
realize the extent of the danger, since those new workmen, 
who had been herded into suburban colonies, created an 
economic but not a political problem in the cities. But Aus- 
tria had been far-seeing: no sooner had the Slav newcomers 
become permanent settlers, than the governors of the coastal 
districts formed "greater cities" by enlarging the boundaries 
of the various towns so as to include the Slav suburbs. Then 
religion was made to play an underground political role by 
means of corrupt priests, who were induced to represent 
Italy as a nation of atheists. Under all these influences, the 
municipal elections in a number of cities soon brought to 
power only a minority of the Italian element, and a motley 
majority speaking many tongues and animated by conflict- 
ing interests, but all ready to unite in humiliating the 
Italians. Meanwhile, Italy, bound and gagged by the treaty 
of Triple Alliance, was powerless to interfere and even to 
protest. But the year 1914 arrived; and Austria lit the fuse 
which was to set all Europe ablaze. 

Who were to be the first to feel the meaning of that 
tragedy,'* The unredeemed provinces. Their boys were the 
ones who fought the first winter campaign against Russia, 
"Our loyal sons of Italian race have been given the high 
honor of holding the front line in fighting our Russian 
enemies," ran the Austrian official resume of winter opera- 



i6o WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

tions. The Austrian general staff must have thought that 
by means of such "high honors" the problem of irredentismo 
would soon be solved. But it was not. Here in Rome there 
stands a Colosseum where the pagans thought they had 
wiped out all Christianity in blood and fire; but that light 
flamed up clearer than ever. An ideal cannot be strangled. 

With what hearts those Italians in Austrian uniforms must 
have fought! It is said that their Viennese or Hungarian 
officers often told them: "Fight bravely, and your province 
will get what she longs for." What did that sibylline state- 
ment mean.'' Was their bravery to be rewarded by their 
provinces being turned over to Italy after the war.f* And if 
so, how could Italy endure the shame of fighting her own 
wars of independence by means of a foreign army made up 
of her own flesh and blood .^ Poor boys! Little did they know 
that Italy was gaining time and feverishly preparing to 
enter the struggle on the only side consistent with her ideals 
of freedom and justice. Spring came, and with it categorical 
Austrian statements as to the future of the irredenti. The 
Trentini were given to understand by Austria that they 
would be ceded to Italy as the price of that country's neu- 
trality: news which they accepted with mingled shame and 
joy. The Triestini, on the contrary, were firmly told that a 
definitive end to their political aspirations must come — 
and they rebelled, their souls filled with hate for Austria 
and with contempt for Italy. The streets were charged by 
cavalry; much blood of old men, women, and children was 
shed. Then, dramatically, the unexpected. Italy denounces 
the treaty of Triple Alliance, the frontier is closed, the cables 
are cut, mail is stopped, the railroad bridges are blown up, 
regiments pour in from North and East, cities are darkened, 
thousands of law-abiding citizens of Italian race are rushed in 
freight cars to concentration camps, and, on May 25, 191 5, 
the first booming of distant guns is heard among the peaks of 
the Trentino and on the Adriatic coast. 

Are they thinking of all this, are they living again those 
tragic days preceded and followed by days not much less 
tragic, these irredenti who still crowd silently around the old 
man with dreamy eyes, as the early Christians must have 
crowded around their spiritual leaders on the eve of martyr- 
dom.'* I was still looking at them in reverent silence, when 



ITALY i6i 

my eye was caught by a bit of brilliant color just outside the 
door — red feathers, white gloves and military frogs, gold 
epaulets: the unmistakable uniform of the Italian carahin- 
iere or gendarme, gorgeous remnant of days of Spanish 
domination in Italy. There were two of them, discreetly try- 
ing to see the entire group of the irredenti from the doorsill, 
while somebody from the outside was talking to them in an 
agitated whisper which was becoming more and more audible 
with the growing excitement of the speaker, whom I could 
not at first see. 

As I approached the group, I found that the third person 
was a Calabrian lawyer, guest of the house. He was in a 
boiling rage, and turned to me for approval: "It is an out- 
rage, and I hope that these carahinieri whom I have called 
in will see to it that it stops. Look at that group! Irredenti 
all of them to the last. Their young men are all in the Italian 
army, and these women claim that they loathe Austria and 
love Italy. Yet when Gorizia is taken, instead of joining the 
crowd which is shouting and waving flags, they avoid our 
eyes, and shun our company, and behave in a most sus- 
picious way. I tell you, they are only pretending to be 
Italian, and came here merely to escape Austrian horse- 
chestnut bread! Why, this very morning the lady who 
flaunts that huge Trieste coat of arms as a brooch, in speak- 
ing of the unreliability of anti-aircraft guns, actually said, 
'The Trieste Museum was wrecked by our own guns' — and 
she meant the Austrian guns! Why don't you carabinieri lock 
her up at once.?" 

The carabinieri did not comply. These representatives of 
the most wonderful police body I have ever seen, as much 
beloved and trusted by the population as are the Canadian 
mounted police, consulted each other in an undertone, 
thanked the gentleman for calling their attention to a group 
of people who behaved with more reserve than other Italians, 
and stated that if anything actually detrimental to the coun- 
try's interests should take place, they would be pleased to 
hear about it. Then they straightened up, touched their 
strange, theatrical, preposterous headgear, and gravely went 
away, leaving me to struggle with the southern lawyer. 

Had he ever been in America.? No.? Well, if he had, he 
would have known how loosely the personal pronoun "our" 



i62 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

is used by the immigrant classes there. How often have I 
heard a naturalized citizen of the United States — a real one, 
one who has renounced his previous allegiance without any 
mental reservations — say again and again *'our schools" or 
"our coal mines" or "our churches," meaning the schools, 
coal mines, and churches of his native, instead of those of 
his adopted, land! The mixture of ideas in a country of 
many races is a natural thing, and must be excused. Many 
a patriotic Swiss from the Ticino will say: "We Italians are 
the best of the Swiss." Indeed, before the war began, a 
Triestino might have told his Emperor: "We Italians are 
the best of your subjects" — and it would have sounded like 
a permissible, nay, like an ultra-loyal statement, since the 
word "Italian" was naturally allowed, while the word 
"Italy" was tabooed. And the mixture of races and inter- 
ests and influences in the border lands, where the inhabitants 
have to wage unceasingly the double war against a natural 
process of internationalization, on the one hand, and an 
organized campaign of denationalization, on the other, 
engenders a confusion in the minds of the inhabitants, whose 
speech and manners and appearance proclaim the strange 
contrast — all but their feelings, which cling tenaciously to the 
ancestral root. This last is an essential point; and Germany 
knows now what a mistake she made when she overlooked 
it in dealing with the Belgian problem; when, in other 
words, she supposed that Belgian national feeling must be 
more or less a thing of the past in an internationalized and 
bilingual land, which was a sort of hallway of three countries, 
and where all languages were spoken and all coins accepted. 
Yet when the supreme moment came Belgians rallied by that 
most tragic of flags. 

Take the example of Signora Maurogordato, that beau- 
tiful brunette whose eyes are fixed upon the bird's-eye view 
of Trieste as seen from an Italian airship, which has just 
appeared in "Illustrazione Italiana." Her people were 
typical examples of the ubiquitous Levantine: they lived 
everywhere and nowhere on the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean. Her father, although of Italian ancestry, was a 
Greek citizen born in Kavala, a Balkan city over which 
Turkish, Bulgarian, and Greek flags have flown during the 
last few years. But he soon moved to Trieste, where he took 



ITALY 163 

up Austrian citizenship and married an irredenta. A child 
was born there, who went to a public school, where she spoke 
German with her teachers and Venetian dialect with her 
schoolmates; at home she spoke Greek with her father and 
Italian with her mother. When the storm broke out in 
Europe and everybody ran home for shelter, she hastened 
to Italy, the land which she had never seen — but which was 
the only place where the soul of that cosmopolitan personal- 
ity could say, "I belong." 

"Come, children. Come and sing." The lady whose hus- 
band is (or was) a professor at Riva has risen with an inspired 
gesture. Her large black eyes have feline sparks, strangely 
contrasting with her white curls. She briskly goes to the 
piano, followed by all the children. One or two chords, and 
then — 

On the peaks — on the peaks of the Trentino 

We shall plant — we shall plant our dear Tricolor; 

O Trieste — O Trieste, thou beloved, 

Soon will freedom — soon will freedom come to thee! 

I have heard boys off for the front, and wounded soldiers 
in hospital wards sing that beautiful "Hymn of Freedom"; 
but the fateful words, coming firmly, and unmingled with 
adult voices, from the lips of a dozen unredeemed children 
whose eyes were moist and whose cheeks were pale with 
emotion, sent through my veins a shiver as keen as a blade. 
That song had sent me to jail once. Don't frown, timor- 
ous reader. I have never been to jail again; and for that 
one visit there, I am not sorry. It happened during Triple 
Alliance days, when Italy paid for the high honor of being 
mentioned in history in connection with two powerful coun- 
tries, by playing the part of traveling companion, appar- 
ently the equal and actually the servant of the rich and 
great. Austria was then in the thick of her anti-Italian cam- 
paign; and the chief occupation of the Italian government 
consisted in preventing Italian public opinion from turning 
its attention to that systematic persecution. Newspaper 
editorials about It were suppressed by the censor; the Aus- 
trian consulates were guarded day and night by policemen 
in plain clothes; the Chamber of Deputies was a constant 
pandemonium, as the various representatives united in 



i64 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Inveighing against Austrian policies only to be ousted by the 
special officers policing the building, while the speaker re- 
peated the stereotyped announcement: "Italy cannot offi- 
cially criticise the Internal policies of an allied country." 

In the midst of It all, the International Convention of 
Alpine Clubs met at Riva, on the Austrian side of Lake 
Garda. There were delegations from the French, Swiss, 
and Italian Alpine Clubs, and they were all asked to bring 
their social insignia. When the lake boat landed the Italian 
delegation at Riva, the other delegations were on the pier, 
and waved their flags as a salute. Naturally enough, the 
Italian flag-bearer (a civil engineer from Milan, who Is now 
a Senator of the Kingdom) responded to the salute by un- 
furling and waving the Italian flag. Then the inhabitants 
of that unredeemed city, for whom it is a crime even to 
wear red and white flowers with green leaves in their button- 
holes, sent up a frantic yell, ran to the pier, and wildly waved 
their handkerchiefs, shouting "Viva ITtalial" The police 
did quick work. They arrested several scores of people, 
including the entire Italian delegation, which consisted 
mainly of professional men. Some were soon released; but 
the flag-bearer spent a whole week In prison, and was only 
set free through the intervention of a "neutral" diplomat. 

I was then a high-school student In Florence. We boys 
heard at once of the fresh outrage, through an "under- 
ground railway"; and our blood boiled. Could not some- 
thing be done.'' Some of us had a great Idea. The Austrian 
Consulate was on the second floor of a big palace, whose 
first floor was occupied by the family of one of our boys 
named Guldi. The plot was laid. Early in the afternoon, 
five or six of us went quietly, with books under our arms, to 
the apartment of our chum. A few minutes later another 
small group followed; they all talked nonchalantly about 
school affairs — about some professor with a funny new hat 
or an odd necktie. More and more groups arrived, rang the 
outer bell, were admitted; the plain-clothes men must have 
thought that the boys were about to found a school organiza- 
tion, or were getting up a scheme for an outing. But we were 
getting up something different; and at the appointed moment 
we all rushed out into the street, waving the large Italian 
flag of the Guldi family, and yelling the inspiring words of 



ITALY 165 

the then forbidden "Hymn of Freedom." Passers-by, dazed 
at first, joined us, while the few plain-clothes men struggled 
hard around the waving flag, which they only captured in 
rags — when the reserves came. Several of us were hand- 
cuffed; I was not, but a big policeman held me so firmly by 
the collar that I could not free myself, and had to follow my 
captor to headquarters. For two long hours we waited in a 
jail cell — a sorry-looking lot, but proud. 

Then we were called out, and confronted by a police judge 
and by our principal. The former, alternating fearful shouts 
with benevolent smiles and even an occasional wink, said 
that some of us had undoubtedly been guilty of a very 
serious offense, as we had voiced our disapproval of an allied 
country. Unfortunately it had been impossible to prove who 
in the crowd had been guilty of the offense, and therefore he 
could do nothing against us; he hoped, however, that our 
principal would inflict a severe punishment upon all the 
classes which had participated in such a plot. The principal — 
a veteran of Garibaldi's campaigns — told us that his fatherly 
love for us had been so wounded by our behavior, that he 
found no words fit to condemn to a sufficient degree the 
crime committed; but he surely would do so later, as soon as 
the sting had passed. Judging from outward signs, it has not 
passed yet. 

The hotel piano is being covered; the children have sung 
patriotic songs steadily for a half hour, and their little lungs 
cannot keep up with their big enthusiasm. They have sung 
well, and I cannot help thinking that the same number of 
"redeemed" children would probably have broken down 
long before, because any kind of choral singing is distasteful 
to the Italian, and a chorus is soon sure to split itself into 
a small percentage of soloists and a large percentage of quit- 
ters. War-time animosity does not make me blind to the 
fact that these children owe their choral ability and their 
musical discipline to their having been brought up under a 
Teuton government. 

Wishing to show my appreciation to my special little 
friends, Fiorello and Marcello Rivolin, eight-year-old twins 
from Fiume, I take one on each knee. "Do you know, 
coccoli, that I went to jail once for singing that 'Hymn of 
Freedom'.''" I expect to be asked why; but I am to be dis- 



i66 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

appointed. How can unredeemed children be surprised at 
the idea of political imprisonment? I am the one to be sur- 
prised! Florello asks gravely: "And did your back hurt you 
much afterwards?" What can he mean? I appeal to the 
child's mother, who has come to claim her offspring. 

"Oh, I can see what the child means," replies the lady, 
with a bitter smile. "He thinks that the Italian police 
dealt with you as the Austrian police dealt with my younger 
sister." 

"Did you ever hear," she went on, "of a Dr. Tazzoli, a 
priest who was hanged by the Austrians in 1852 at Belfiore, 
with nine others, because of their love of liberty? Well, 
Dr. Tazzoli was my great-uncle. I am only mentioning that 
to show you how our family must naturally feel towards 
Austria. My sister went to a private school, in order to avoid 
the public schools where everything is taught with a decided 
Austrian bias. But the Supervisor of Education discovered 
that the Austrian national hymn was never sung in that 
school, and sent an angry note to its principal, ordering 
the hated hymn to be sung each day before any classes met. 
There was no escape from that; and all the girls — getting 
whatever comfort they could from the fact that they would 
sing the words in Italian, one of the eight official languages of 
the empire — submitted, with one exception, to the Inevitable. 
The exception was my sister. She said she would not soil 
her lips with the hated words. The following morning, when 
the class began to sing the opening words, 'Viva 11 nostro 
Imperador' (Long live our Emperor), she filled the room with 
a lusty 'Viva 11 nostro Implccador' (Long live our Hangman). 
There was an uproar. The teachers were terrified. They Im- 
plored the girls not to speak of the affair; but within two 
hours the police had arrested my sister. My father begged 
that he be allowed to pay a pecuniary penalty, the principal 
pleaded on the grounds of youth and thoughtlessness; but 
the police were adamant, and on the following day my seven- 
teen-year-old sister, stripped to the waist, received twenty 
stripes on her back. Florello Is right; her back did ache when 
she left prison, and has never quite ceased aching since. As 
soon as Italy declared war on Austria, she was sent to a con- 
centration camp somewhere In the Danubian swamps; and 
when last I heard from her, three months ago, she said that 



ITALY 167 

she was very ill, and asked me never to forget any page of her 
life. O my God, how much longer must we irredenti go on 
being punished so frightfully for the love we bear to our 
country! " 

Great land beyond the seas, answer this question for us, 
for we are able to see only one-half of the world's horizon. 



VI. RUSSIA 

The problems of Russian character and Russian destiny, 
long anxiously discussed by the intellectuals of that coun- 
try, have become a vital interest to the world. A searching 
analysis of the national temper and an optimistic prophecy 
of the harmonizing role which Russia is destined to play 
among the nations are found in the novelist Dostoevsky's 
study of the first great Russian poet: Pushkin. Tolstoy's de- 
precation of patriotism and government is another remark- 
able document, pessimistic as compared with Dostoevsky, 
and very significant of the trend which reaction against auto- 
cratic and militaristic authority would take. 

The deep love of the Russian land and something of the 
temperament of the oppressed bourgeois class and Jewish 
race appear in the emigrant's war-time remembrance of his 
native village, Kartiishkiya-Beroza. Meantime, Andreev, 
the greatest living writer of the country, portrays in the dis- 
illusionment following the Revolution the heroisms and in- 
firmities of the chief factor in the situation, the Russian 
Soldier. 



(a) RUSSIAN CHARACTER AND RUSSIAN 

DESTINY 

F. DOSTOEVSKY: SPEECH DELIVERED ON 8TH JUNE, 
1880, AT THE MEETING OF THE SOCIETY OF LOVERS 
OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

In Aleko ^ Pushkin had already discovered, and portrayed 
with genius, the unhappy wanderer in his native land, the 
Russian sufferer of history, whose appearance in our society, 
uprooted from among the people, was a historic necessity. 
The type is true and perfectly rendered, it is an eternal type, 
long since settled in our Russian land. These homeless Rus- 

^ The aristocratic hero of Pushkin's early poem, "The Gipsies." 
169 



lyo WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

slan wanderers are wandering still, and the time will be long 
before they disappear. If they in our day no longer go to 
gipsy camps to seek their universal ideals in the wild life 
of the Gipsies and their consolation away from the confused 
and pointless life of our Russian intellectuals, in the bosom 
of nature, they launch into Socialism, which did not exist 
in Aleko's day, they march with a new faith into another 
field, and there work zealously, believing, like Aleko, that 
they will by their fantastic occupations obtain their aims and 
happiness, -not for themselves alone, but for all mankind. 
For the Russian wanderer can find his own peace only in the 
happiness of all men; he will not be more cheaply satisfied, 
at least while it is still a matter of theory. It is the same 
Russian man who appears at a different time. This man, 
I repeat, was born just at the beginning of the second century 
after Peter's great reforms, in an intellectual society, up- 
rooted from among the people. Oh, the vast majority of in- 
tellectual Russians in Pushkin's time were serving then 
as they are serving now, as civil servants, in government 
appointments, in railways or in banks, or earning money in 
whatever way, or engaged in the sciences, delivering lectures 
— all this in a regular, leisurely, peaceful manner, receiving 
salaries, playing whist, without any longing to escape into 
gipsy camps or other places more in accordance with our mod- 
ern times. They go only so far as to play the liberal, "with 
a tinge of European Socialism," to which Socialism is given 
a certain benign Russian character — but it is only a matter 
of time: What if one has not yet begun to be disturbed, while 
another has already come up against a bolted door and 
violently beaten his head against it.^ The same fate awaits all 
men in their turn, unless they walk in the saving road of 
humble communion with the people. But suppose that this 
fate does not await them all: let "the chosen" suffice, let 
only a tenth part be disturbed lest the vast majority remain- 
ing should find no rest through them. Aleko, of course, is still 
unable to express his anguish rightly: with him everything 
is still somehow abstract; he has only a yearning after na- 
ture, a grudge against high society, aspirations for all men, 
lamentations for the truth, which some one has somewhere 
lost, and he can by no means find. Wherein is this truth, 
where and in what she could appear, and when exactly she 



RUSSIA 171 

was lost, he, of course, cannot say, but he suffers sincerely. 
In the meantime a fantastic and impatient person seeks for 
salvation above all in external phenomena; and so it should 
be. Truth is as it were somewhere outside himself, perhaps in 
some other European land, with their firm and historical 
political organizations and their established social and civil 
life. And he will never understand that the truth is first of 
all within himself. How could he understand this .'* For a whole 
century he has not been himself in his own land. He has for- 
gotten how to work, he has no culture, he has grown up 
like a convent schoolgirl within closed walls, he has fulfilled 
strange and unaccountable duties according as he belonged 
to one or another of the fourteen classes into which educated 
Russian society is divided. For the time being he is only a 
blade of grass, torn from the roots and blown through the 
air. And he feels It, and suffers for It, suffers often acutely! 
Well, what If, perhaps belonging by birth to the nobility and 
probably possessing serfs, he allowed himself a nobleman's 
liberty, the pleasant fancy of being charmed by men who live 
"without laws," and began to lead a performing bear in a 
gipsy camp? Of course, a woman, "a wild woman," as a cer- 
tain poet says, would be most likely to give him hope of a 
way out of his anguish, and with an easy-going, but passion- 
ate belief, he throws himself into the arms of Zemphira. 
"Here Is my way of escape; here I can find my happiness, here 
in the bosom of nature far from the world, here with people 
who have neither civilization nor law." And what happens.? 
He cannot endure his first collision with the conditions of 
this wild nature, and his hands are stained with blood. 
The wretched dreamer was not only unfitted for universal 
harmony, but even for Gipsies, and they drive him away — 
without vengeance, without malice, with simple dignity. 

Leave us, proud man, 

We are wild and without law, 

We torture not, neither do we punish. 

This Is, of course, all fantastic, but the proud man is real, 
his image sharply caught. Pushkin was the first to seize the 
type, and we should remember this. Should anything happen 
in the least degree not to his liking, he Is ready to torment 
cruelly and punish for the wrong done to him, or, more com- 



172 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

fortable still, he will remember that he belongs to one of the 
fourteen classes, and will himself call upon — this has hap- 
pened often — the torturing and punishing law, if only his 
private wrong may be revenged. No, this poem of genius is 
not an imitation! Here already is whispered the Russian 
solution of the question, "the accursed question," in accord- 
ance with the faith and justice of the people. 



No, I will say deliberately, there never had been a poet 
with a universal sympathy like Pushkin's. And it is not his 
sympathy alone, but his amazing profundity, the reincarna- 
tion of his spirit in the spirit of foreign nations, a reincarna- 
tion almost perfect and therefore also miraculous, because 
the phenomenon has never been repeated in any poet in all 
the world. It is only in Pushkin; and by this, I repeat, he is a 
phenomenon never seen and never heard of before, and in 
my opinion, a prophetic phenomenon, because — because 
herein was expressed the national spirit of his poetry, the 
national spirit in its future development, the national spirit 
of our future, which is already implicit in the present, and 
it was expressed prophetically. For what is the power of the 
spirit of Russian nationality if not its aspiration after the 
final goal of universality and omni-humanity.^ No sooner 
had he become a completely national poet, no sooner had he 
come into contact with the national power, than he already 
anticipated the great future of that power. In this he was a 
seer, in this a prophet. 

For what is the reform of Peter the Great to us, not merely 
for the future, but in that which has been and has already 
been plainly manifested to us.'' What did that reform mean to 
us.'* Surely it was not only the adoption of European clothes, 
customs, inventions and science. Let us examine how it was, 
let us look more steadily. Yes, it is very probable that at the 
outset Peter began his reform in this narrowly utilitarian 
sense, but in the course of time, as his idea developed, Peter 
undoubtedly obeyed some hidden instinct which drew him 
and his work to future purposes, undoubtedly more vast than 
narrow utilitarianism. Just as the Russian people did not 
accept the reform in the utilitarian spirit alone; but un- 
doubtedly with a presentiment which almost instantly fore- 



RUSSIA 173 

warned them of a distant and incomparably higher goal than 
mere utilitarianism. I repeat, the people felt that purpose 
unconsciously, but felt it directly and quite vitally. Surely 
we then turned at once to the most vital reunion, to the unity 
of all mankind! Not in a spirit of enmity (as one might have 
thought it would have been) but in friendliness and perfect 
love, we received into our soul the geniuses of foreign nations, 
all alike without preference of race, able by instinct from 
almost the very first step to discern, to discount distinctions, 
to excuse and reconcile them, and therein we already showed 
our readiness and inclination, which had only just become 
manifest to ourselves, for a common and universal union with 
all the races of the great Aryan family. Yes, beyond all 
doubt, the destiny of a Russian is pan-European and univer- 
sal. To become a true Russian, to become a Russian fully 
(in the end of all, I repeat) means only to become the brother 
of all men, to become, if you will, a universal man. All our 
Slavophilism and Westernism is only a great misunderstand- 
ing, even though historically necessary. To a true Russian, 
Europe and the destiny of all the mighty Aryan family is as 
dear as Russia herself, as the destiny of his own native coun- 
try, because our destiny is universality, won not by the 
sword, but by the strength of brotherhood and our fraternal 
aspiration to reunite mankind. If you go deep into our history 
since Peter's reform, you will already find traces and indica- 
tions of this idea, of this dream of mine, if you will, in the 
character of our intercourse with European nations, even in 
the policy of the state. For what has Russian policy been 
doing for these two centuries if not serving Europe, perhaps, 
far more than she has served herself. I do not believe this 
came to pass through the incapacity of our statesmen. The 
nations of Europe know how dear they are to us. And in 
course of time I believe that we — not we, of course, but our 
children to come — will all without exception understand that 
to be a true Russian does indeed mean to aspire finally to 
reconcile the contradictions of Europe, to show the end of 
European yearning in our Russian soul, omnl-human and 
all-uniting, to Include within our soul by hrotherly love all 
our brethren, and at last, it may be, to pronounce the final 
Word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly 
communion of all nations in accordance with the law of the 



174 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

gospel of Christ! I know, I know too well, that my words 
may appear ecstatic, exaggerated and fantastic. Let them 
be so, I do not repent having uttered them. They ought to be 
uttered, above all now, at the moment that we honor our 
great genius who by his artistic power embodied this idea. 
The idea has been expressed many times before. I say noth- 
ing new. But chiefly it will appear presumptuous. "Is this 
our destiny, the destiny of our poor, brutal land.'' Are we 
predestined among mankind to utter the new word.^" 

Do I speak of economic glory, of the glory of the sword or 
of science.'' I speak only of the brotherhood of man; I say 
that to this universal, omni-human union the heart of Russia, 
perhaps more than all other nations, is chiefly predestined; 
I see its traces in our history, our men of genius, in the 
artistic genius of Pushkin. Let our country be poor, but this 
poor land "Christ traversed with blessing, in the garb of a 
serf." Why then should we not contain His final word.'' Was 
not He Himself born in a manger.'' I say again, we at least 
can already point to Pushkin, to the universality and omni- 
humanity of his genius. He surely could contain the genius of 
foreign lands in his soul as his own. In art at least, in artistic 
creation, he undeniably revealed this universality of the 
aspiration of the Russian spirit, and therein is a great 
promise. If our thought is a dream, then in Pushkin at least, 
this dream has solid foundation. Had he lived longer, he 
would perhaps have revealed great and immortal embodi- 
ments of the Russian soul, which would then have been 
intelligible to our European brethren; he would have at- 
tracted them much more and closer than they are attracted 
now, perhaps he would have succeeded in explaining to them 
all the truth of our aspirations; and they would understand 
us more than they do now, they would have begun to have 
insight into us, and would have ceased to look at us so sus- 
piciously and presumptuously as they still do. Had Pushkin 
lived longer, then among us too there would perhaps be fewer 
misunderstandings and quarrels than we see now. But God 
saw otherwise. Pushkin died in the full maturity of his 
powers,^ and undeniably bore away with him a great secret 
into the grave. And now we, without him, are seeking to 
divine his secret, 

^ Pushkin, born 1799, was slain in a duel in 1837. 



RUSSIA 175 



(b) THE SEEDS OF BOLSHEVISM 

COUNT TOLSTOY: PATRIOTISM AND GOVERNMENT 

(1900) 

III 

Patriotism, as a feeling of exclusive love for one's own peo- 
ple, and as a doctrine of the virtue of sacrificing one's tran- 
quillity, one's property, and even one's life, in defense of 
one's own people from slaughter and outrage by their en- 
emies, was the highest idea of the period when each nation 
considered it feasible and just, for its own advantage, to 
subject to slaughter and outrage the people of other nations. 

But, already some 2,000 years ago, humanity, in the per- 
son of the highest representatives of its wisdom, began to 
recognize the higher idea of a brotherhood of man; and that 
idea, penetrating man's consciousness more and more, has 
in our time attained most varied forms of realization. 
Thanks to improved means of communication, and to the 
unity of industry, of trade, of the arts, and of science, men 
are to-day so bound one to another that the danger of con- 
quest, massacre, or outrage by a neighboring people, has 
quite disappeared, and all peoples (the peoples, but not the 
Governments) live together in peaceful, mutually advan- 
tageous, and friendly commercial, industrial, artistic, and 
scientific relations, which they have no need and no desire to 
disturb. One would think, therefore, that the antiquated 
feeling of patriotism — being superfluous and incompatible 
with the consciousness we have reached of the existence of 
brotherhood among men of different nationalities — should 
dwindle more and more until it completely disappears. Yet 
the very opposite of this occurs: this harmful and antiquated 
feeling not only continues to exist, but burns more and more 
fiercely. 

The peoples, without any reasonable ground, and contrary 
alike to their conception of right and to their own advan- 
tage, not only sympathize with Governments in their attacks 
on other nations, in their seizures of foreign possessions, and 
in defending by force what they have already stolen, but 



176 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

even themselves demand such attacks, seizures, and de- 
fenses: are glad of them, and take pride in them. The small 
oppressed nationalities which have fallen under the power 
of the great States — the Poles, Irish, Bohemians, Finns, or 
Armenians — resenting the patriotism of their conquerors, 
which is the cause of their oppression, catch from them the 
infection of this feeling of patriotism — which has ceased to 
be necessary, and is now obsolete, unmeaning, and harmful — 
and catch it to such a degree that all their activity is con- 
centrated upon it, and they, themselves suffering from the 
patriotism of the stronger nations, are ready, for the sake of 
patriotism, to perpetrate on other peoples the very same 
deeds that their oppressors have perpetrated and are per- 
petrating on them. 

This occurs because the ruling classes (including not only 
the actual rulers with their officials, but all the classes who 
enjoy an exceptionally advantageous position: the capital- 
ists, journalists, and most of the artists and scientists) can 
retain their position — exceptionally advantageous in com- 
parison with that of the laboring masses — thanks only to 
the Government organization, which rests on patriotism. 
They have in their hands all the most powerful means of 
Influencing the people, and always sedulously support pa- 
triotic feelings In themselves and in others, more especially 
as those feelings which uphold the Government's power are 
those that are always best rewarded by that power. 

Every official prospers the more in his career, the more 
patriotic he is; so also the army man gets promotion in time 
of war — the war is produced by patriotism. 

Patriotism and its result — wars — give an enormous reve- 
nue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other 
trades. Every writer, teacher, and professor is more secure 
in his place the more he preaches patriotism. Every Emperor 
and King obtains the more fame the more he Is addicted to 
patriotism. 

The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, 
the schools, the churches, and the press. In the schools they 
kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories de- 
scribing their own people as the best of all peoples and always 
in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, ju- 
bilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press. Above 



RUSSIA 177 

all, they inflame patriotism in this way: perpetrating every 
kind of injustice and harshness against other nations, they 
provoke in them enmity towards their own people, and then 
in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against 
the foreigner. 

The intensification of this terrible feeling of patriotism 
has gone on among the European peoples in a rapidly in- 
creasing progression, and in our time has reached the utmost 
limits, beyond which there is no room for it to extend. 

IV 

Within the memory of people not yet old, an occurrence 
took place showing most obviously the amazing intoxica- 
tion caused by patriotism among the people of Christendom. 

The ruling classes of Germany excited the patriotism of 
the masses of their people to such a degree that, in the second 
half of the nineteenth century, a law was proposed in accord- 
ance with which all the men had to become soldiers: all the 
sons, husbands, fathers, learned men, and godly men, had to 
learn to murder, to become submissive slaves of those above 
them in military rank, and be absolutely ready to kill whom- 
soever they were ordered to kill; to kill men of oppressed 
nationalities, and their own working-men standing up for 
their rights, and even their own fathers and brothers — as was 
publicly proclaimed by that most impudent of potentates, 
William II. 

That horrible measure, outraging all man's best feelings in 
the grossest manner, was, under the influence of patriotism, 
acquiesced In without murmur by the people of Germany. 
It resulted in their victory over the French. That victory yet 
further excited the patriotism of Germany, and, by reaction, 
that of France, Russia, and the other Powers; and the men 
of the European countries unresistingly submitted to the in- 
troduction of general military service — I. e., to a state of 
slavery Involving a degree of humiliation and submission 
incomparably worse than any slavery of the ancient world. 
After this servile submission of the masses to the calls of 
patriotism, the audacity, cruelty, and Insanity of the Gov- 
ernments knew no bounds. A competition in the usurpation 
of other peoples' lands in Asia, Africa, and America began — 



178 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

evoked partly hy whim, partly by vanity, and partly by 
covetousness — and was accompanied by ever greater and 
greater distrust and enmity between the Governments. 

The destruction of the inhabitants on the lands seized was 
accepted as a quite natural proceeding. The only question 
was, who should be first in seizing other peoples' land and 
destroying the inhabitants.? All the Governments not only 
most evidently infringed, and are infringing, the elementary 
demands of justice in relation to the conquered peoples, and 
in relation to one another, but they were guilty, and con- 
tinue to be guilty, of every kind of cheating, swindling, brib- 
ing, fraud, spying, robbery, and murder; and the peoples not 
only sympathized, and still sympathize, with them In all 
this, but they rejoice when It Is their own Government and 
not another Government that commits such crimes. 

The mutual enmity between the different peoples and 
States has reached latterly such amazlngdimensions that, not- 
withstanding the fact that there is no reason why one State 
should attack another, everyone knows that all the Govern- 
ments stand with their claws out and showing their teeth, 
and only waiting for someone to be In trouble, or become 
weak, In order to tear him to pieces with as little risk as pos- 
sible. 

All the peoples of the so-called Christian world have been 
reduced by patriotism to such a state of brutality, that not 
only those who are obliged to kill or be killed desire slaughter 
and rejoice in murder, but all the people of Europe and Amer- 
ica, living peaceably In their homes exposed to no danger, 
are, at each war — thanks to easy means of communication 
and to the press — in the position of the spectators In a Ro- 
man circus, and, like them, delight In the slaughter, and raise 
the bloodthirsty cry, " Pollice versoT ^ 

Not adults only, but also children, pure, wise children, 
rejoice, according to their nationality, when they hear that 
the number killed and lacerated by lyddite or other shells 
on some particular day was not 700 but 1,000 Englishmen 
or Boers. 

And parents (I know such cases) encourage their children 
in such brutality. 

1 Pollice verso ("thumb down") was the sign given in the Roman amphitheaters 
by the spectators who wished a defeated gladiator to be slain. 



RUSSIA 179 

But that is not all. Every increase in the army of one nation 
(and each nation, being in danger, seeks to increase its army 
for patriotic reasons) obliges its neighbors to increase their 
armies, also from patriotism, and this evokes a fresh in- 
crease by the first nation. 

And the same thing occurs with fortifications and navies: 
one State has built ten ironclads, a neighbor builds eleven; 
then the first builds twelve, and so on to infinity. 

" I'll pinch you." "And I'll punch your head." "And I'll 
stab you with a dagger." " And I'll bludgeon you." " And I'll 
shoot you." . . . Only bad children, drunken men, or ani- 
mals, quarrel or fight so, but yet it is just what is going on 
among the highest representatives of the most enlightened 
Governments, the very men who undertake to direct the 
education and the morality of their subjects. 

V 

The position is becoming worse and worse, and there is no 
stopping this descent towards evident perdition. 

The one way of escape believed in by credulous people has 
now been closed by recent events. I refer to the Hague Con- 
ference, and to the war between England and the Trans- 
vaal which immediately followed it. 

If people who think little, or but superficially, were able 
to comfort themselves with the Idea that international courts 
of arbitration would supersede wars and ever-increasing 
armaments, the Hague Conference and the war that followed 
it demonstrated in the most palpable manner the impossibil- 
ity of finding a solution of the difficulty in that way. After 
the Hague Conference, it became obvious that as long as 
Governments with armies exist, the termination of arma- 
ments and of wars Is impossible. That an agreement should 
become possible, it Is necessary that the parties to it should 
trust each other. And In order that the Powers should trust 
each other, they must lay down their arms, as is done by the 
bearers of a flag of truce when they meet for a conference. 

So long as Governments, distrusting one another, not only 
do not disband or decrease their armies, but always increase 
them In correspondence with augmentations made by their 
neighbors, and by means of spies watch every movement of 



i8o WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

troops, knowing that each of the Powers will attack its 
neighbor as soon as it sees its way to do so, no agreement 
is possible, and every conference is either a stupidity, or a 
pastime, or a fraud, or an impertinence, or all of these to- 
gether. 

It was particularly becoming for the Russian rather than 
any other Government to be the enfant terrible of the Hague 
Conference. No one at home being allowed to reply to all 
its evidently mendacious manifestations and rescripts, the 
Russian Government is so spoilt, that — having without the 
least scruple ruined its own people with armaments, strangled 
Poland, plundered Turkestan and China, and being specially 
engaged in suffocating Finland — it proposed disarmament to 
the Governments, in full assurance that it would be trusted! 

But strange, unexpected, and indecent as such a proposal 
was — especially at the very time when orders were being 
given to increase its army — the words publicly uttered in 
the hearing of the people were such, that for the sake of 
appearances the Governments of the other Powers could not 
decline the comical and evidently insincere consultation; 
and so the delegates met — knowing in advance that nothing 
would come of it — and for several weeks (during which they 
drew good salaries) though they were laughing in their 
sleeves, they all conscientiously pretended to be much oc- 
cupied in arranging peace among the nations. 

The Hague Conference, followed up as it was by the 
terrible bloodshed of the Transvaal War, which no one 
attempted, or is now attempting, to stop, was, nevertheless, 
of some use, though not at all in the way expected of it — it 
was useful because it showed in the most obvious manner 
that the evils from which the peoples are suffering cannot be 
cured by Governments. That Governments, even if they 
wished to, can terminate neither armaments nor wars. 

Governments, to have a reason for existing, must defend 
their people from other people's attack. But not one people 
wishes to attack, or does attack, another. And therefore 
Governments, far from wishing for peace, carefully excite 
the anger of other nations against themselves. And having 
excited other people's anger against themselves, and stirred 
up the patriotism of their own people, each Government then 
assures its people that it is in danger and must be defended. 



RUSSIA 



I8I 



And having the power in their hands, the Governments 
can both irritate other nations and excite patriotism at 
home, and they carefully- do both the one and the other; 
nor can they act otherwise, for their existence depends on 
thuS acting. 

If, in former times. Governments were necessary to de- 
fend their people from other people's attacks, now, on the 
contrary, Governments artificially disturb the peace that 
exists between the nations, and provoke enmity among 
them. 

When it was necessary to plough in order to sow, plough- 
ing was wise; but evidently it is absurd and harmful to go on 
ploughing after the seed has been sown. But this is just what 
the Governments are obliging their people to do: to infringe 
the unity which exists, and which nothing would infringe if it 
were not for the Governments. 

VI 

In reality what are these Governments, without which 
people think they could not exist.'' 

There may have been a time when such Governments were 
necessary, and when the evil of supporting a Government was 
less than that of being defenseless against organized neigh- 
bors; but now such Governments have become unnecessary, 
and are a far greater evil than all the dangers with which 
they frighten their subjects. 

Not only military Governments, but Governments in 
general, could be, I will not say useful, but at least harmless, 
only if they consisted of immaculate, holy people, as is 
theoretically the case among the Chinese. But then Govern- 
ments, by the nature of their activity, which consists in 
committing acts of violence,^ are always composed of ele- 
ments the most contrary to holiness — of the most audacious, 
unscrupulous, and perverted people. 

A Government, therefore, and especially a Government 
entrusted with military powea-, is the most dangerous or- 
ganization possible. 

^ The word government is frequently used in an indefinite sense as almost equiva- 
lent to management or direction; but in the sense in which the word is used in the 
present article, the characteristic feature of a Government is that it claims a moral 
right to inflict physical penalties, and by its decree to make murder a good action. 



i82 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

The Government, in the widest sense, including capitalists 
and the Press, is nothing else than an organization which 
places the greater part of the people in the power of a smaller 
part, who dominate them; that smaller part is subject to a 
yet smaller part, and that again to a yet smaller, and sfl on, 
reaching at last a few people, or one single man, who by 
means of military force has power over all the rest. So that 
all this organization resembles a cone, of which all the parts 
are completely in the power of those people, or of that one 
person, who happen to be at the apex. 

The apex of the cone is seized by those who are more 
cunning, audacious, and unscrupulous than the rest, or by 
someone who happens to be the heir of those who were 
audacious and unscrupulous. 

To-day it may be Boris Godunof,^ and to-morrow Gregory 
Otrepyef.^ To-day the licentious Catherine, who with her 
paramours has murdered her husband; to-morrow Pougat- 
chef ; ^ then Paul the madman, Nicholas I, or Alexander III. 

To-day it may be Napoleon, to-morrow a Bourbon or an 
Orleans, a Boulanger or a Panama Company; to-day it may 
be Gladstone, to-morrow Salisbury, Chamberlain, or Rhodes. 

And to such Governments is allowed full power, not only 
over property and lives, but even over the spiritual and 
moral development, the education, and the religious guidance 
of everybody. 

People construct such a terrible machine of power, they 
allow any one to seize it who can (and the chances always 
are that it will be seized by the most morally worthless) — 
they slavishly submit to him, and are then surprised that 
evil comes of It. They are afraid of Anarchists' bombs, and 
are not afraid of this terrible organization which is always 
threatening them with the greatest calamities. 

People found it useful to tie themselves together in order 
to resist their enemies, as the Circassians '* did when resisting 

^ Boris Godunof, brother-in-law of the weak Tsar Fyodor Ivanovitch, succeeded 
in becoming Tsar, and reigned in Moscow from 1598 to 1605. 

^ Gregory Otrcpyef was a pretender who, passing himself off as Dimitry, son of 
Ivan the Terrible, reigned in Moscow in 1605 and 1606. 

' Pougatchef was the leader of a most formidable insurrection in 1773-1775, 
and was executed in Moscow in 1775. 

* The Circassians, when surrounded, used to tie themselves together leg to leg, 
that none might escape, but all die fighting. Instances of this kind occurred 
when their country was being annexed by Russia. 



RUSSIA 183 

attacks. But the danger is quite past, and yet people go on 
tying themselves together. 

They carefully tie themselves up so that one man can 
have them all at his mercy; then they throw away the end 
of the rope that ties them, and leave it trailing for some 
rascal or fool to seize and to do them whatever harm he likes. 

Really, what are people doing but just that — when they 
set up, submit to, and maintain an organized and military 
Government .? 



(c) THE RUSSIAN BOURGEOISIE 
ALTER BRODY: KARTUSHKIYA-BEROZA ^ 

It is twelve years since I have been there — in that little 
town by the river where I was born. It all comes back to me 
now, as I read in the newspaper: — 

" The Germans have seized the bridge-head at Kartushkiya- 
Beroza; the Russians are retreating in good order across the 
marshes; the town is in flames.^'' 

Kartushkiya-Beroza! Sweet-sounding, time-scented name — 
smelling of wide-extending marshes of hay, of cornfields, of 
apple-orchards, of cherry trees in full blossom; smelling of 
all the pleasant recollections of my childhood, of grand- 
mother's kitchen, grandmother's freshly baked dainties, 
grandmother's plum-pudding — Kartushkiya-Beroza! 

I see before me a lane running between two rows of 
straggling cottages. I cannot remember the name of the 
lane; I do not know whether it has any name at all, but I 
remember it was broad and unpaved and shaded with wide- 
branching chestnuts, and entered the market-place just a 
few houses after my grandfather's — Kartushkiya-Beroza! 

I can see it even now, my grandfather's house — on the 
lane, to the right, as you come from the market-place — a 
big, hospitable frame building, big like my grandfather's own 
heart and hospitable like grandmother's smile. I can see it 
even now, with the white-pillared porch in the center and the 
sharp-gabled roof pierced with little windows, and the great 

* First published in the Atlantic Monthly, June, 1916. A slightly different version, 
arranged as free verse, is found in Cunliffe's "Poems of The Great War." 



i84 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

quadrangular garden behind It, and the tall fence surround- 
ing the garden, and the old well in the corner of the garden 
with the bucket-lift rising high over the fence — Kartushkiya- 
Beroza! 

I can see him even now, my grandfather — bending over 
me, tall and sad-eyed and thoughtful — lifting me up and 
seating me on his knees, lovingly, and listening to all my 
childish questions and confessions; pardoning, admonishing, 
remonstrating; satisfying my questioning soul with good- 
humored Indulgence. 

And my grandmother — dear little woman! I could never 
dissociate her from plum-puddings and apple-dumplings and 
raisin-cakes and almond-cakes and crisp potato pancakes, 
and the smell of fish frying on the fire. Then there is my 
cousin Miriam, who lived in the yellow house across the 
lane — a freckle-faced little girl with a puckered-up nose and 
eyes like black cherries. I was very romantic about her. 

And then there is my curse, my rival at school, my arch- 
enemy — ^Jacob, the synagogue sexton's boy, on whom I was 
always warring. God knows on what battlefield he must be 
lying now! There is Nathan and Joseph and Berel and 
Solomon and Ephraim, the baker's boy; Baruch, Gershen 
and Mendel, and long-legged, sandy-haired Emanuel who 
fell into the pond with me that time, while we were skating 
on the ice — Kartushkiya-Beroza! 

I can see myself even now in the lane on a summer's day, 
cap in hand, chasing after dragon-flies. Suddenly, nearby, 
sounds the noise of drums and bugles — I know what that 
means! Breathlessly I dash up the lane. It is the regiment 
quartered in the barracks at the end of the town, in its 
annual parade on the highway — how I should like to be 
one of those gray-coated heroes! I watch them eager-eyed, 
and run after them until they reach the Gentile quarter — 
Kartushkiya-Beroza! 

I am in the market-place at a fair. It is a heaving mass of 
carts and horses and oxen; the oxen are lowing, the horses 
neighing, the peasants cursing in a dozen different dialects. 
I am in grandfather's store on the lower end of the market- 
place, right opposite the public well: the store is full of 
peasants and peasant women bargaining at the top of their 
voices. The men are clad in rough sheepskin coats and fur 



RUSSIA 185 

caps, their women are gay In bright-colored cottons, with 
red kerchiefs round their heads. M7 grandfather stands 
behind the counter measuring out rope to some peasants; 
grandmother is cutting a strip of linen for a peasant woman, 
chaffering with another one at the same time about the price 
of a pair of sandals — and I am sitting there, behind the 
counter, on a sack of flour, playing with my black-eyed little 
cousin — Kartushkiya-Beroza . . . 

It comes back to me suddenly that I am sitting here with a 
newspaper in my hand, reading: — 

" The Germans have seized the bridge-head at Kartushkiya- 
Beroza; the Russians are retreating in good order across the 
marshes; the town is in flame s!^^ 



(d) THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF REVOLUTION 

LEONID ANDREEV: TO THE RUSSIAN SOLDIER 

(January, 1918.) 

Soldier, what hast thou been under Nicholas the Second? 
Thou hast been a slave of the autocrat. Conscience, honor, 
love for the people, were beaten out of thee in merciless 
training by whip and stick. 

"Kill thy father and thy mother if they raise their hands 
against me," commanded the autocrat, — and thou becamest 
a parricide. 

"Kill thy brother and thy sister, thy dearest friend and 
everyone who raises a hand against me," commanded the 
autocrat, — and thou didst kill thy brother and thy dearest 
friend, and becamest like Cain, shedding the blood of thy kin. 

When the gray coats appeared in the streets and the rifles 
and bayonets glittered — we knew what that meant: it was 
death stalking! It meant death to those innocent and hungry 
ones who thirsted for brighter life and raised their voices 
bravely against the tyrant. It meant death, destruction, 
peril, tears, and horror. Thou wast terrible. Soldier! 

But thou wast brave in the field, Russian Soldier. . . . 
Thou wast a martyr, but thou wast never a traitor, nor a 
coward. Soldier! 

The Russian people loved thee secretly for this and waited 



186 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

for thy awakening. . . . They called to thee: "Come to us, 
beloved brother! Come to thy people. The people are waiting 
for thee!" 

Soldier, what hast thou been in the days of the Revolu- 
tion } 

Thou hast been our love, our happiness, our pride. We 
did not know as yet who thou wast. We were still in dread 
of the gray coats, we still mistrusted the dashing cossacks. 
And dost thou remember, Soldier, how the heart of the 
people leaped when the first blow of the cossack's saber fell 
not on the head of his brother but on that of the policeman- 
executioner.? Dost thou remember it.? 

But still we were not able to believe. Already our hearts 
were overcome with joy, happiness took our breath away, 
but still we did not believe. How is it possible to believe all 
at once in freedom.? 

Yet the soldiers are bringing it with them! They are com- 
ing, stalwart, brave, beautiful, in their armed power. They 
are coming to give their life for freedom. As yet they them- 
selves do not know whether they are all awakened. The 
Tsar's hirelings shoot at them from the roofs and from be- 
hind street corners. The soldiers expect only death, yet they 
are coming, stalwart, brave, beautiful! 

Then we believed them. The throne of the Romanovs 
cracked with a noise heard throughout the world. For the 
first time in our life soldiers' bullets sang a new song — not 
the song of death, of shame, and of degradation, but the 
wonderful song of freedom and of joy. . . . 

And what hast thou become now, Soldier.? 

When, cursing, drunken, thou didst come tearing down 
peaceful streets in thy automobiles, threatening women and 
children with guns, bragging, debauching, swearing the 
basest of oaths — didst thou hear the answer of the people.? 
"Be accursed! Be accursed!" Thou didst shoot in mad 
frenzy, and the people yelled fearlessly to thee: "Be ac- 
cursed!" 

Scoundrel! With quick-firing guns didst thou threaten; 
yet invalids, old men, and women grabbed at thy rifle with 
their bare hands and tore it away from thee. And thou didst 
give it away, overcome with shame, helpless, sweating, ugly. 

Soldier! How many didst thou kill in those days? How 



RUSSIA 187 

many orphans hast thou made? How many bereaved mothers 
hast thou left inconsolable? Dost thou hear the words that 
their lips whisper? The lips from which thou hast banished 
forever the smile of happiness? — "Murderer, Murderer!" 

But what of mothers? What of orphans? A moment came 
unforeseen and still more terrible. Thou hast betrayed Rus- 
sia. Thou hast thrown thy native land that nourished thee 
under the feet of the enemy, thou Soldier, our sole defense! 

Everything is entrusted to thee: the life and welfare of 
Russia; our fields and forests; our peaceful rivers; our vil- 
lages and cities; our temples and those who are praying in 
them. 

And all this thou hast betrayed, Soldier! — the quiet fields, 
and the young, buoyant liberty. Behind thy back grain was 
ripening in the fields — Russia's sacred treasury; now the 
Germans will reap it. Under thy protection the people were 
working in their villages; now they are running along all the 
highways, leaving dead in their wake. Children and old men 
are weeping — they have no roof over their heads, no home, 
only death staring into their faces. 

Ah! how thou didst run from the enemy, Russian Soldier! 
Never before has the world seen such a rout, such a mob of 
traitors. It knew the one Judas, while here were tens of 
thousands of Judases running past each other, galloping, 
throwing down rifles, quarrelling, and still boasting of their 
"meetings." What are they hurrying for? They hurry to 
betray their native land. They do not even wait for the 
Germans to shoot, so great is their haste to betray Russia, 
so ready are they to deliver her almost by force into the hands 
of the astounded enemy. 

And what hast thou done to thy officers, Soldier? See, what 
piles of them lie in the fields appealing to the all-merciful and 
all-forgiving God, with their still, sightless eyes! They called 
thee — thou didst not obey. They went alone to their death — 
and they died. They died. Soldier! 

And what hast thou done to thy comrades? Traitor! Dost 
thou see their bodies? Dost thou see the ditches where care- 
less German hands have thrown them? It is thou who didst 
kill them! 

But look ahead of thee. Soldier! Dost thou see that ter- 
rible structure that is being erected in Russia? 



i88 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

It is the scaffold. 

And for whom is it? For thee, Soldier! For thee, traitor 
and coward, who hast betrayed Russia and her liberty. Thou 
seest, but thou dost not understand as yet. Thou dost not 
understand our sorrow. 

Was Russia not happy in having destroyed the scaffold 
as it seemed forever, and in giving its accursed memory to 
oblivion.'* But now it grows again, unwelcome, sinister, evil, 
like the shadows of night. 

Thou hast torn the body of Russia. Now thou desirest to 
tear her heart and soul — thou. Soldier. 

Thou, Soldier, whom we loved and whom we still love. 

Arise! — Look at thy country which is calling in distress. 

Awake! — If cruel fate has no laurels of victory in store for 
thee, put the crown of thorns on thy head. Through it thou 
shalt find expiation, through it thou shalt regain our love. 

Russia is dying, Russia is calling to thee: 

"Arise, dear Soldier!" 



VII. SERBIA AND THE 
CZECHO-SLOVAKS 

Serbia and Bohemia have histories much alike. In each 
country a period of splendid independence was snuffed out 
by a single crushing battle which led to centuries of oppres- 
sion. What Kossovo (June 15, 1389) was for Serbia, White 
Mountain (Nov. 8, 1620) was for Bohemia. In both countries 
the national spirit was kept alive by popular poetry. The 
Serbian ballad literature is said to be unsurpassed in Europe: 
it deals particularly with the epic story of the death of Prince 
Lazarus and his nobles at Kossovo and with the less tragic 
adventures of Prince Marko of Prilep. In a lecture delivered 
before British soldiers in 1916, after the apparently final 
ruin of his nation, Father Velimirovic indicates the place 
which these ballads hold in the life of the people and explains 
on sentimental grounds the Serbian interest in Macedonia. 

The Bohemian poems quoted are in their English form 
memorials of the revolution of 1848, having been translated 
at that time by A. H. Wratislaw, Fellow of Christ's College, 
Cambridge. On the other hand, the official "Appeal to the 
Powers of the Entente" by M. Edouard Benes dates from 
1917, and in its confident tone reveals the writer's pride in 
the romantic recent achievements of Czecho-Slovak troops. 



(a) SERBIAN NATIONAL POETRY 

THE BATTLE OF KOSSOVO ^ 

I 

The Sultan Murad o'er Kossovo comes 
With banners and drums. 

* This very effective poem of "Owen Meredith" (ist Earl of Lytton, 1831-1891) 
is by no means a literal translation, but rather a combination of several Serbian 

189 



190 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

There, all in characters fair, 

He wrote a letter; and there 

Bade his estaffettes despatch 

To bear it to Krouchevatch, 

To the white-wall'd town of the Tsar, 

To the hands of Prince Lazar. 

"Listen, Lazarus, chief of the Serbs, to me! 

That which never hath been, that which never shall be, 

Is that two lords one land should sway, 

And the same rayas two tributes pay. 

Send to me, therefore, the tributes and keys, 

The golden keys of each white town; 

And send me a seven years' tribute with these. 

But if this thou wilt not do, 

Then come thou down over Kossovo: 

On the field of Kossovo come thou down. 

That we may divide the land with our swords, 

These are my words." 

When Lazarus this letter had read, 
Bitter, bitter were the tears he shed. 

II 

A grey bird, a falcon, comes flying apace 

From Jerusalem, from the Holy Place; 

And he bears a light swallow abroad. 

It is not a grey bird, a falcon, God wot! 

But the Saint Elias; and it is not 

A light swallow he bears from afar. 

But a letter from the Mother of God 

To the Tzar who in Kossovo stays. 

And the letter is dropt on the knees of the Tzar; 

And these are the words that it says: — 

"Lazarus, Prince of a race that I love. 
Which empire choosest thou? 
That of the heaven above.? 
Or that of the earth below? 

ballads, known to the poet chiefly through the French version of Dozon. For further 
information regarding Serbian national poetry see "Heroic Ballads of Serbia" 
by Noyes and Bacon (19 13). 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS 191 

If thou choose thee an earthly realm, * 

Saddle horse, belt, spur, and away! 

Warriors, bind ye both saber and helm, 

And rush on the Turks, and they 

With their army whole shall perish. 

But If rather a heavenly crown thou cherish, 

At Kossovo build ye a temple fair. 

There no foundations of marble lay, 

But only silk of the scarlet dye. 

Range ye the army in battle array, 

And let each and all full solemnly 

Partake of the blessed sacrament there. 

For then of a certainty know 

Ye shall utterly perish, both thou. 

And thine army all; and the Turk shall be 

Lord of the land that is under thee." 

When the Tzar he read these words. 

His thoughts were as long and as sharp as swords. 

"God of my fathers, what shall I choose.? 

If a heavenly empire, then must I lose 

All that is dearest to me upon earth; 

But if that the heavenly here I refuse, 

What then is the earthly worth? 

It is but a day, 

It passeth away, 

And the glory of earth full soon is o'er. 

And the glory of God is more and more." 

"What is this world's renown.?" 

(His heart was heavy, his soul was stirr'd.) 

"Shall an earthly empire be preferr'd 

To an everlasting crown.? 

At Kossovo build me a temple fair: 

Lay no foundations of marble down, 

But only silk of the scarlet dye." 

Then he sent for the Servian Patriarch: 

With him twelve bishops to Kossovo went. 

It was at the lifting of the dark: 

They ranged the army in battle array, 

And the army all full solemnly 



192 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Received the blessed sacrament, 
And hardly was this done, when lo! 
The Turks came rushing on Kossovo. 



VII 

All when the misty morn was low, 
And the rain was raining heavily 
Two ravens came from Kossovo, 
Flying along a lurid sky: 
One after one, they perched upon 
The palace of the great Lazar, 
And sat upon the turret wall. 
One 'gan croak, and one 'gan call, 
"Is this the palace of the Tzar? 
And is there never a soul inside?" 

Was never a soul within the hall, 

To answer to the ravens' call. 

Save Militza.^ She espied 

The two black birds on the turret wall. 

That all in the wind and rain did croak. 

And thus the ravens she bespoke: 

"In God's great name, black ravens, say, 

Whence came ye on the wind to-day? 

Is it from the plain of Kossovo? 

Hath the bloody battle broke? 

Saw ye the two armies there? 

Have they met? And, friend or foe, 

Which hath vanquisht? How do they fare?" 

And the two black fowls replied: 
"In God's great name, Militza, dame, 
From Kossovo at dawn we came. 
A bloody battle we espied: 
We saw the two great armies there. 
They have met, and ill they fare. 

Fallen, fallen, fallen are 
The Turkish and the Christian Tzar. 
^ The Queen. 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS 193 

Of the Turks is nothing left 
Qf the Serbs a remnant rests, 
Hackt and hewn, carved and cleft,- 
Broken shields, and bloody breasts." 
And lo! while yet the ravens spoke, 
Up came the servant, Miloutine: 
And he held his right hand, cleft 
By a ghastly saber stroke, 
Bruis'd and bloody, in his left; 
Gasht with gashes seventeen 
Yawn'd his body where he stood, 
And his horse was dripping blood. 

"O sorrow, sorrow, bitter woe 

And sorrow, Miloutine!" she said; 

"For now I know my lord is dead. 

For, were he living, well I know, 

Thou hadst not left at Kossovo 

Thy lord forsaken to the foe." 

And Miloutine spake, breathing hard: 

"Get me from horse: on cool greensward 

Lay me, lay me, mistress mine: 

A little water from the well 

To bathe my wounds in water cold. 

For they are deep and manifold; 

And touch my lip with rosy wine, 

That I may speak before I die. 

I would not die before I tell 

The tale of how they fought and fell." 

She got him from his bloody steed, 

And wiped the death-drops from his brow, 

And in the fresh grass laid him low; 

And washt his wounds in water cold, 

For they were deep and manifold; 

Full ghastly did they gape and bleed: 

She stanch'd them with her garment's fold, 

And lightly held his body up. 

And bathed his lips with rosy wine, 

And all the while her tears down ran, 

And dropt into the golden cup; 



194 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

And still she question'd of the war: 
"0 tell me, tell me, Miloutlne, 
Where fell the glorious Prince Lazar? 
Where are fallen my brothers nine? 
Where my father, Youg Bogdan? 
Where Milosch, where Vouk Brankovitch? 
And where Strahlnia Banovitch?" 
Then when the servant, Miloutine, 
Three draughts had drain'd of rosy wine, 
Although his eyes were waxing dim, 
A little strength came back to him. 
He stood up on his feet, and, pale 
And ghastly, thus began the tale: 

"They will never return again, 

Never return! ye shall see them no more; 

Nor ever meet them within the door. 

Nor hold their hands. Their hands are cold. 

Their bodies bleach in bloody mould. 

They are slain! all of them slain! 

And the maidens shall mourn, and the mothers deplore. 

Heaps of dead heroes on battle plain. 

Where they fell, there they remain, 

Corpses stiff in their gore. 

But their glory shall never grow old. 

Fallen, fallen, in mighty war. 

Fallen, fighting about the Tzar, 

Fallen, where fell our lord Lazar! 

Never more be there voice of cheer! 

Never more be there song or dance! 

Muffled be moon and star! 

For broken now is the lance, 

Shiver'd both shield and spear, 

And shatter'd the scimitar. 

And cleft is the golden crown. 

And the sun of Servia is down, 

O'erthrown, o'erthrown, o'erthrown, 

The roof and top of our renown. 

Dead is the great Lazar! 

"Have ye seen when the howling storm-wind takes 
The topmost pine on a hoary rock, 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS 195 

Tugs at it, and tears, and shakes, and breaks, 

And tumbles it into the ocean? 

So when this bloody day began, — 

In the roaring battle's opening shock, 

Down went the grey-hair'd Youg Bogdan. 

And following him, the noblest man 

That ever wore the silver crown 

Of ^ge, grown grey in old renown, 

One after one, and side by side 

Fighting, thy nine brothers died: 

Each by other, brother brother 

Following, till death took them all. 

But of these nine the last to fall 

Was Bocko. Him, myself, I saw. 

Three awful hours — a sight of awe, 

Here, and there, and everywhere, 

And all at once, made manifest. 

Like a wild meteor in a troubled air, 

Whose motion never may be guessed. 

For over all the lurid rack 

Of smoking battle, blazed and burn'd. 

And stream'd and flasht, 

Like flame before the wind upturn'd, 

The great imperial ensign splasht 

With blood of Turks: where'er he dasht 

Amongst their bruised battalions, I 

Saw them before him reel and fly: 

As when a falcon from on high. 

Pounce on a settle-down of doves. 

That murmurs make in myrrhy groves, 

Comes flying all across the sky, 

And scatters them with instant fright; 

So flew the Turks to left and right. 

Broken before him. Milosch fell. 

Pursued by myriads down the dell. 

Upon Sitnitza's rushy brink, 

Whose chilly waves will roll, I think. 

So long as time itself doth roll. 

Red with remorse that they roll o'er him. 

Christ have mercy on his soul. 

And blessed be the womb that bore him. 



196 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Not alone he fell. Before him 
Twelve thousand Turkish soldiers fell, 
Slaughter'd in the savage dell. 
His right hand was wet and red 
With the blood that he had shed, 
And in that red right hand he had 
(Shorn from the shoulder sharp) the head 
Of the Turkish Tzar, Murad. 

"There resteth to Servia a glory, 

A glory that shall not grow old; 

There remaineth to Servia a story, 

A tale to be chanted and told! 

They are gone to their graves grim and gory. 

The beautiful, brave, and bold; 

But out of the darkness and desolation, 

Of the mourning heart of a widow'd nation, 

Their memory waketh an exultation! 

Yea, so long as a babe shall be born, 

Or there resteth a man in the land — 

So long as a blade of corn 

Shall be reapt by a human hand — 

So long as the grass shall grow 

On the mighty plain of Kossovo — 

So long, so long, even so. 

Shall the glory of those remain 

Who this day in battle were slain. 

"And as for what ye inquire 

Of Vouk, — when the worm and mole 

Are at work on his bones, may his soul 

Eternally singe in hell-fire! 

Curst be the womb that bore him! 

Curst be his father before him! 

Curst be the race and the name of him! 

And foul as his sin be the fame of him! 

For blacker traitor never drew sword — 

False to his faith, to his land, to his lord! 

And doubt ye, doubt ye, the tale I tell.? 

Ask of the dead, for the dead know well; 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS 197 

Let them answer ye, each from his mouldy bed, 
For there is no falsehood among the dead: 
And there be twelve thousand dead men know, 
Who betray'd the Tzar at Kossovo." 



(b) SERBIA AND MACEDONIA 

NICHOLAS VELIMIROVIC: THE HOME OF THE SER- 
BIAN SOUL (1916) 

The home of the Serbian soul Is Macedonia. It must have 
been once a charming country worthy of the great men like 
Philip and Alexander, worthy of Saint Paul's mission to it, 
worthy of Byzantium's effort to save it from the Slavs, 
worthy of all the Turkish sacrifices to conquer it, worthy 
of several Serbian kings who gave their lives defending it. 
It was a rich and beautiful spot on this earth. It was the 
center of the Serbian mediseval state and power, the very 
heart of the Serbian glory from the time when the Serbs 
became Christians till the tragedy of Kossovo, and after 
this tragedy till the death of King Marko of Prilep in the 
beginning of the fifteenth century. Even during the time of 
slavery under the Turks, Macedonia was the source of all 
the spiritual and moral inspirations and supports of the en- 
slaved nation. It happened only accidentally that the north- 
ern part of Serbia was liberated a hundred years ago while 
Macedonia remained still in chains. In the north, in the dense 
forests and the mountains around Belgrade and Kraguievaz, 
the guerilla war started a great insurrection which succeeded. 
This guerilla war meant a gradual destruction of the Turk- 
ish dominions in the whole northern part: in Shumadija, 
Bosnia, Croatia and Dalmatia. But I say the guerilla war 
in Shumadija, around Belgrade and Kraguievaz, was a 
success. Karageorge liberated a part of the Serbian country 
In the north, and this part was finally recognized by the great 
powers of Europe and called Serbia. But neither Karageorge 
nor anybody in Serbia has forgotten Macedonia. Macedonia 
was not only a part of our history, but it has become a part 
of our soul. The principal and the greater part of our na- 
tional poetry, which means our Shakespeare and which 



198 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

meant our Bible, describes Serbian Macedonia, her heroes, 
her historic events, her struggle with the Turks, her slavery, 
and her customs and hopes. Serbian children know the names 
of the towns like Skoplje (Uskub), Prilep, Ochrida, and the 
heroes' names, Urosh, Stephen, Lilutin, Dushan, Marko 
and Ugljesha, before they learn in the school to write these 
names. Our national poetry is our national education, our 
education is our soul. Macedonia represents a great part of 
our poetry, which means that she forms a great part of our 
soul. To say Macedonia does not belong to Serbia means the 
same as to say, the Serbian soul does not belong to the Ser- 
bians. Could you imagine England without Stratford, the 
birthplace of Shakespeare.'' I don't think you could. So we 
cannot imagine a Serbia without Prilep, the source, yea, the 
birthplace of our national poetry. Every people must have 
some sacred soil in their country, a part more sacred than 
other parts, which binds them more to their fatherland, 
which excites their enthusiasm, and which obliges them to 
defend and to die for it. I was born in Northern Serbia, in a 
town which has been very important in our modern history. 
But I must tell you that it was not Valevo, my birthplace, 
which inspired me to be a Serb in soul, but rather Prilep, 
Skoplje and Ochrida, the places where our spirit and our 
virtues of old flourished, together with Kossovo, where our 
national body was destroyed. Valevo has been very little 
mentioned in our national poetry, Valevo and even Bel- 
grade, in comparison with Macedonia. Northern Serbia 
has been in our Middle Ages more a part of our body than 
of our soul. But Macedonia, ... A Bulgarian diplomat 
formerly in Rome once ironically told a Serbian sculptor in 
a discussion about Macedonia: "We Bulgars know that King 
Marko of Prilep is a Serbian. Well, give us Prilep, that is 
what we want, and keep King Marko for yourselves!" That 
is the true Bulgarian spirit. The Greeks have understood us 
better. They have many brothers of their own in Monastir 
and Ochrida, and still they recognized the Serbian rights in 
the central and northern parts of Macedonia, claiming for 
themselves only the southern part, and giving to the Bulgars 
the eastern part of it. Yet they could claim Macedonia not 
with less rights than the Bulgars did. Why.? Because Mace- 
donia never was the center of a Greek Empire, as it never 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS 199 

was the center of a Bulgarian Empire. It was a provincial 
country of the old Byzantine Empire. It was a country 
temporarily conquered by the Bulgars, the center of the 
Bulgarian kingdom being Tirnovo and its neighborhood. 
But it was quite a center of all the best things that we Serbs 
created and possessed in our past. Our national soul cannot 
live without this part of our national body. I remember a 
conversation in Nish between a French sailor and a Serbian 
writer. The French sailor said: "But you will perish if you do 
not give Macedonia to the Bulgars.?" The Serbian writer 
replied quietly: "Let us perish for the sake of our soul." 
An English gentleman asked me the other day: "Why have 
you been obstinate in not yielding Macedonia to the Bul- 
gars, while we even are ready to yield to the Greeks, offering 
them Cyprus.''" "Yes," I said, "we can well appreciate your 
sacrifice, but still Prilep for us is rather what Stratford — and 
not Cyprus — is for you. And even I, not being an English- 
man, could never agree that you should offer Shakespeare's 
birthplace to anybody in the world." 

Perhaps the Bulgars would not have attacked us in this 
war if we had given Macedonia to them, although it is not 
certain, because the frontiers of their ambitions are in Con- 
stantinople, Salonica and on the Adriatic. Still Serbia could 
not barter her soul like Faust with Mephistophiles. Five 
hundred years ago the Serbs and Greeks defended Macedonia 
from the Turkish invasion. In 191 2 it was Serbia with Greece 
again who liberated Macedonia from the Turkish yoke. Bul- 
garia never defended Macedonia from the Turks. Her first 
fighting for Macedonia was in 1913 against Serbs, Greeks and 
Roumanians. And Serbia sacrificed not only many things and 
many lives for Macedonia, but twice even her independence 
— once five hundred years ago, and for the second time at the 
present moment. Yes, Serbia is now killed because of Mace- 
donia. Indeed, all Serbia's fighting and suffering have been 
because of Macedonia. She fought against the Turks be- 
cause of Macedonia. She fought against the Bulgars because 
of Macedonia. And she now is losing her independence be- 
cuase of Macedonia. Because she could not give Macedonia, 
which means her glory, her history, her poetry, her soul, 
she is now trodden down and killed. Serbia could not live 
without Macedonia. Serbia did what she could — she died 



200 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

for Macedonia. And if one day, God willing, from this blessed 
island (Great Britain) should sound the trumpet for the 
Resurrection for all the dead, killed by the German sword, 
I hope Serbia will rise from her grave together with Mace- 
donia, as one body and one soul. 



(c) BOHEMIAN LONGINGS FOR FREEDOM 
BOLESLAW JABLONSKY: THE THREE AGES 

There was a time, when in each nation's ear 
The name of Czechs right gloriously sounded; 

By heroes borne, by dukes unknown to fear, 
Its fame and praise all Europe thro' redounded. 

There was a time Bohemians proudly bore 

The splendid, glorious, mighty Czeskish name; 

When ev'ry muse and science to adore 

To all Bohemia's sons was pride and fame. 

There was a time, when from a throne on high 

The "sweet Bohemian tongue" ^ was heard to sound; 

Entrancing music, heav'nly harmony, 
In princely palaces it spread around. 

O then the Czech was proud a Czech to be! 

Proud to maintain the honor of his race! 
Bloom'd in the Lion's land prosperity,^ 

Such as but patriot nations e'er can grace! 

That time passed by; an age of ill came on, 

An age Bohemia's people doom'd to quell; 
Its moral forces faintness seiz'd upon. 

Itself in intellectual bondage fell. 

The Czech his mother-country ceased to love. 

He ceased himself to treasure as before; 
No more his sires' remember'd exploits move, 

Their glories to deserve he strives no more. 

1 The expression of the Emperor Charles IV. 

^ The Lion with two tails is the emblem of Bohemia. 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS 201 

The Czech denied his country, blood and tongue; 

All that his fathers priz'd from home was thrown; 
Speech, customs, loses foreigners among, 

And doth the brethren of his blood disown. 

Then sank Bohemia's sun In cheerlessness, 
Her Genius 'gan weep with drooping head, 

Fled from the land the nation's happiness, 
And all the fam'd Bohemian Muses fled. 

O then what pangs the patriot's bosom rend, 

Thus past the golden ages of his home! 
O then how mourn'd the people's real friend. 

The nation sinking In so foul a tomb! 

But lo! God's Angel calls, "Arise again!" 

"Up from your graves," his trumpet sounds, "arise!" 

"Spires of the patriot's temple, gleam again! 
Nation, thy resurrection solemnize!" 

Thus speaks the patriot Angel gloriously, 

And lo! what thousands from their graves upstart! 

Each joying that his life again Is free. 

All utt'ring thanks to God with grateful heart! 

Th' ancestral spirit in Its wondrous might 

Inspireth all the corners of the land; 
The words "He Is arisen" glad recite 

The priests who in their country's temple stand. 

Then rise up all! ye sleepers till to-day! 

The day-star Is aris'n — the dawn doth glow! — ■ 
The nightingales are singing — why delay? — 

Shame on the man who is the laggard now! 

O brethren, for your nation live again! 

Be lifeless members of its corpse no more! 
It and your mother-land confess again! 

Be faithful sons and brethren as of yore! 



202 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Your language, customs, rights, ye Czechs, revere! 

And prove Indeed ye are Bohemians born! 
So shall th' ancestral glories re-appear, 

Your own lov'd land in splendor to adorn! 

THE PATRIOT'S LAMENT 

Mountain, mountain, thou art high! 
Hear'st thou not our wailing cry? 
See'st thou not the streams that slow 
From the eyes of patriots flow? 

Wherefore shines the sun on thee, 
That thy top doth glitter free, 
And thy meadows ev'ry May 
To our sorrow blossom gay? 

Hear how sounds Vltava's shore! ^ 
Hear the distant thunders roar! 
'Tis our lips in whispers low 
Cursing thee for evermore. 

Doth the true Czech thee espy. 
Terror-struck he draweth nigh. 
Anguish dire his bosom fires, 
That he sleeps not with his sires. 

Cursed mountain, mountain white! 
Upon thee was crush'd our might; 
What in thee lies cover'd o'er 
Ages cannot back restore. 

When the glorious times were set, 
Men must needs the tombs forget; 
Where their fathers' blood was spilt, 
There the lads a church have built. 

Storm, why shatter'st thou it not? 
Tempest, why destroy'st it not? 
Nation, why in glorious war 
Driv'st thou not thy shame afar? 

^ Vltava, the river Moldau, upon which Prague is situated. 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHOSLOVAKS 203 

But in vain our calls resound, 
Still the mountain sleepeth sound. 
Firm the church abideth there, 
And from tempests nought doth fear. 

Mountain, mountain, thou art high! 
See'st thou life and vengeance nigh? 
When thy church in ruins lies, 
Slawa from her grave shall rise. 

WINARICKY: THE MADJAROMANIA 

Hungarians, Hungarians! 
Why do ye these wrongs? 
Why strive from our people 
To wrench out their tongues? 
This not the wild Tatars 
Endeavor'd to do. 
Than they to be fiercer 
Is't pleasing to you? 

HEJ SLOVANE! 

Hey Slavonians! our Slavonic language still is living, 
Long as our true loyal heart is for our nation striving. 

Lives, lives, the Slavonic spirit, and 'twill live for ever; 

Hell and thunder! vain against us all your rage shall shiver! 

Language is the gift of God, our God who sways the thunder, 
In this world may none our language from us put asunder. 

Though as many devils come, as earth with people swarm- 
eth, 

God is with us, and Perun 'gainst our opponents stormeth. 

Fearful may the tempest o'er us hover, rocks may crumble. 
Oaks may split, and all around may yawning earthquakes 
tremble: 
Like a castle's walls we'll stand, a firm and stedfast na- 
tion, — 
May black earth the scoundrel swallow who deserts his 
station! 



204 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 



(d) A CZECHO-SLOVAK INDICTMENT OF 
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY 

EDOUARD BENES: APPEAL TO THE POWERS OF THE 
ENTENTE (1917)1 

In face of the war the Czechs never hesitated, not waiting, as 
some of the neutrals have done, to see its probable result. 
Their whole past history indicated which side they should 
take. It was, in fact, this war, the fatal end of the history of 
the Austro-Hungarians, this fight to the death against the 
Allied nations, that constituted for the Czechs the necessary, 
logical, and fateful hour of their history. 

There could be no possible doubt. Two years previously 
the heart of every Czech beat high on hearing the announce- 
ment of the glorious victories of his brothers the Serbs, and 
the entire nation hastened with the greatest enthusiasm to 
bring help to the brotherly Yugo-Slav nation. And now the 
two governments of Vienna and Budapest throw us into a 
tragic conflict by sending our soldiers to Serbia, Slavs to kill 
Slavs for the benefit of the Germans and the Magyars. We 
could not fight against our Serbian and Russian brothers, 
nor could we contribute towards the crushing of the French 
and English, for whom we have always entertained much 
love and respect. 

Not only our feelings, our honor even was at stake. 

Surrounded on all sides by our enemies, invaded by the 
Prussian army, strangled, persecuted, and crushed, we re- 
sponded to the call of our hearts. Knowing the Habsburgs, 
we know what awaits us if, after war, Europe leaves us in 
the hands of our enemies. We rebelled as only one can rebel 
to-day, knowing that the fate reserved for us by the Prus- 
sians, the Austro-Magyars, and the Habsburgs, will be that 
of our ancestors after the battle of the White Mountain. 
True, the note of the allied powers of loth January, 1917, 
in answer to President Wilson's message, stating the objects 
of the Quadruple Entente in this war, speaks first of the 
Czecho-Slovaks, and gives a guarantee of their liberation. 
But without waiting for this, we have already ranged our- 

* Chapter X of "Bohemia's Case for Independence." 



SERBIA AND THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS 205 

selves on the side of the Allies — the nation of John Hus, the 
nation of Comenius, Kollar, Palacky,^ could not act other- 
wise. 

Thus we do not come to France and England to implore 
Europe to save us from being crushed under the Pan- 
German yoke. Whatever we have done, we have accom- 
plished our duty. We come to show our deeds, our conduct, 
our past history, what our traditions have been, what 
struggles we have come through, and what are our actual 
desires. We wish to show Europe by undeniable proofs, that 
Austro-Magyars were incapable of acting diiTerently, that a 
contrary line of conduct was for them unthinkable. We wish 
to make it understood, that all the cruelties of the present 
war will certainly be repeated, that the Austrians and Mag- 
yars, the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, will unite on the 
first occasion finally to crush and enslave us. Why should 
they not, having persisted in the attempt for 1200 years .f' 
How could they suddenly become just, equitable, moderate, 
and mild, when for centuries they have been violent, crim- 
inal, and barbarous oppressors? If Europe Is to-day aston- 
ished and revolted at the disheartening sight which the 
coalition of the Central Empires gives us, we Czechs are in 
no way surprised. In truth, we feel some sorrow to find that 
Western Europe knows Vienna and Budapest so little, and 
that the sentimental legends about the old Emperor of 
Schoenbrunn and the illusions about the chivalrous policy of 
the Magyars have been believed by the simple-minded 
public. 

We would have it understood that the only means of 
breaking the power of the Central Empires is completely to 
destroy the Austro-Magyar kernel, on which they base their 
policy. Europe must finally understand the history of this 
Empire and this dynasty. A State which has played such a 
part In history must disappear from the map of Europe! 

Finally, we wish to make It clearly understood that Aus- 
tria, to save her traditions and ancient character, cannot do 
otherwise than give herself up to Prussia. A Pan-German 

^John Hus (I373?-I4I5), reformer and martyr; Comenius (1592-1671), last 
Bishop of the Moravian and Bohemian Brethren, writer on education and theology; 
Kollar (1723-1783), a linguistic scholar and statesman; Palacky (1798-1876), 
Czech patriot and politician. 



2o6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Empire is the final end of the evolution of the Central Eu- 
ropean situation. There Is, therefore, no means but to destroy 
Austria-Hungary, to arrest the Drang nach Osten of Prussia, 
and to break forever the German hegemony In Europe, 
Moreover, an Impassable barrier must be established against 
the Prussians to reduce them to their proper strength so 
that they may easily be kept In check If they should ever 
recommence their sinister schemes of to-day. This barrier — 
as we have already mentioned — may easily be realized. An 
independent Bohemia, supported In the north by a united 
and autonomous Poland, and In the south by the Yugo- 
slav Empire, would form this Impassable Slav barrier. The 
destruction of Austria which would follow, the reduction of 
the Magyars to their proper territory, comprising 8,000,000 
inhabitants of exclusively Magyar nationality, and their 
separation from the Germans by Slav territories would for- 
ever render impossible a recurrence of the present world 
catastrophe. 

This Is what we would impress on the Powers of the En- 
tente. We Czecho-Slovaks, who have borne so many bitter 
struggles and sufferings, to-day have full right to lead a 
complete and Independent national existence. Our tenacity, 
our patience, our perseverance, and our incessant labors 
are the sure proofs that we will not fail In our mission. 

But we have a wider conception of life. The fate of a 
nation who throughout its existence must fight without ces- 
sation against three formidable foes Is indeed heart-rending. 
We are sick of this vain struggle, we aim at higher things 
and ardently desire to continue in the traditions of our great 
ancestors; It Is our heartfelt desire to throw all our energies 
into the great work for the advancement of civilization and 
the amelioration of social conditions. 

That is why to-day we appeal to all those who are inter- 
ested in the work of the reconstruction of Europe, "Dis- 
member Austria-Hungary! Remove from the Habsburgs the 
possibility of continuing to play their sinister part! Liberate 
the Austrian Slavs! Unite the Czecho-Slovaks and the Yugo- 
slavs! Understand that after all It Is in your interest. In the 
interest of Europe, and in the interest of humanity." 



VIII. AMERICA 

The sinking of the Lusitania (May 7, 191 5) rendered articu- 
late the American people's disgust at Prussian methods in 
war. Joyce Kilmer's finely imaginative poem, published in 
the New York Times, illustrates well the deep horror which 
this atrocity excited. About the same time Owen Wister, a 
veteran man of letters intimately acquainted with German 
life and warmly attached to it, produced in "The Pentecost 
of Calamity" an admirably even-tempered and convincing 
analysis of what he calls the Prussianizing of Germany. 

Sympathy with Germany's two chief adversaries expressed 
itself with increasing clearness: the sense of the common 
Anglo-Saxon heritage, for example, in Professor Helen 
Gray Cone's reply to the " Song of Hate " against England; 
impatience to repay the debt which America owed to French 
idealism in Alan Seeger's matchless elegiac ode on the Ameri- 
can volunteers fallen for France. 

The diplomatic correspondence of this country early 
reached a high level of thought and eloquence, as in Mr. Lan- 
sing's reply to the Austrian protest against American traffic 
in munitions and in the note which explained that the United 
States would hold the German government to "a strict 
accountability" for the death of American citizens. More 
important still are the later documents, which are here 
quoted: Mr. Wilson's War Message to Congress, his state- 
ment of the "fourteen articles," and the Baltimore speech 
in which he voiced America's answer to the great German 
offensive of March, 1918. Vachel Lindsay's poem, "Abra- 
ham Lincoln Walks at Midnight," catches well the under- 
lying sentiments of the nation during this period: horror 
over the inhumanities of militarism and earnest longing for 
a just world-peace. 

Two forward-looking essays discuss vital questions of re- 
construction, political and economic respectively. Professor 
Abbott raises the issue of the difference between the ideals 

207 



2o8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

of liberty and equality, and suggests wherein governmental 
efficiency consists. Mr. William Allen White justifies by 
graphic illustration the shift in economic values which the 
war produced. 



(a) THE PROTEST AGAINST PRUSSIANISM 
JOYCE KILMER: THE WHITE SHIPS AND THE RED 

With drooping sail and pennant 

That never a wind may reach, 
They float in sunless waters 

Beside a sunless beach. 
Their mighty masts and funnels 

Are white as driven snow, 
And with a pallid radiance 

Their ghostly bulwarks glow. 

Here is a Spanish galleon 

That once with gold was gay, 
Here is a Roman trireme 

Whose hues outshone the day. 
But Tyrian dyes have faded 

And prows that once were bright 
With rainbow stains wear only 

Death's livid, dreadful white. 

White as the ice that clove her 

That unforgotten day, 
Among her pallid sisters 

The grim Titanic lay. 
And through the leagues above her 

She looked, aghast, and said: 
"What is this living ship that comes ' 

Where every ship is dead.'"' 

The ghostly vessels trembled 
. ' From ruined stern to prow; 

What was this thing of terror 
That broke their vigil now.? 



AMERICA 209 

Down through the startled ocean 

A mighty vessel came, 
Not white, as all dead ships must be, 

But red, like living'"flame! 

The pale green waves about her 

Were swiftly, strangely dyed, 
By the great scarlet stream that flowed 

From out her wounded side. 
And all her decks were scarlet 

And all her shattered crew. 
She sank among the white ghost ships 

And stained them through and through. 

The grim Titanic greeted her, 

"And who art thou.?" she said; 
"Why dost thou join our ghostly fleet 

Arrayed in living red.^' 
We are the ships of sorrow 

Who spend the weary night. 
Until the dawn of Judgment Day, 

Obscure and still and white." 

"Nay," said the scarlet visitor, 

"Though I sink through the sea 
A ruined thing that was a ship, 

I sink not as did ye. 
For ye met with your destiny 

By storm or rock or fight. 
So through the lagging centuries 

Ye wear your robes of white. 

"But never crashing iceberg 

Nor honest shot of foe, 
Nor hidden reef has sent me 

The way that I must go. 
My wound that stains the waters, 

My blood that Is like flame, 
Bear witness to a loathly deed, 

A deed without a name. 



2IO WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

"I went not forth to battle, 

I carried friendly men, 
The children played about my decks, 

The women sang — and then — 
And then — the sun blushed scarlet 

And Heaven hid its face, 
The world that God created 

Became a shameful place! 

"My wrong cries out for vengeance. 

The blow that sent me here 
Was aimed in Hell. My dying scream 

Has reached Jehovah's ear. 
Not all the seven oceans 

Shall wash away the stain; 
Upon a brow that wears a crown 

I am the brand of Cain." 

When God's great voice assembles 

The fleet on Judgment Day, 
The ghosts of ruined ships will rise 

In sea and strait and bay. 
Though they have lain for ages 

Beneath the changeless flood, 
They shall be white as silver. 

But one — shall be like blood. 

OWEN WISTER: THE PENTECOST OF CALAMITY (1915) 

IX 

We can hardly emphasize too much, or sufficiently under- 
line, the moral effect of 1870 on the German nature, the in- 
fluence it had on the German mind. It is essential to a clear 
understanding of the full Prussianizing process that now set 
in. On the German's innate docility and credulity many have 
dwelt, but few on what 1870 did to this. Only with Bis- 
marck's quick, tremendous victory over France as the final 
explanation is the abject and servile faith that the Germans 
thenceforth put in Prussia rendered conceivable to reason. 
They blindly swallowed the sham that Bismarck gave them 



AMERICA 211 

as universal suffrage. They swallowed extreme political and 
military restraint. They swallowed a rigid compulsion in 
schools, which led to the excess in child suicide I have men- 
tioned. They swallowed a state of life where outside the in- 
dicated limits almost nothing was permitted and almost 
everything was forbidden. 

But all this proscription is merely material and has been 
attended by great material welfare. Intellectual speculation 
was apparently unfettered; but he who dared philosophize 
about Liberty and the Divine Right of Kings found it was 
not. Prussia put its uniform not only on German bodies but 
on their brains. Literature and music grew correspondingly 
sterilized. Drama, fiction, poetry and the comic papers be- 
came Invaded by a new violence and a new, heavy obscenity. 
Impatience with the noble German classics was bred by 
Prussia. What wonder, since freedom was their essence.'* 

Beethoven, after Napoleon made himself Emperor, tore 
off the dedication of his "Eroica" symphony to Napoleon. 
And Goethe had said: "Napoleon affords us an example of 
the danger of elevating oneself to the Absolute and sacrificing 
everything to the carrying out of an idea." Goethe fell 
frankly out of date in Berlin. Symphony orchestras could no 
longer properly Interpret Mozart and Beethoven. A strange 
blend of frivolity and bestiality began to pervade the whole 
realm of German art. Scientific eminence degenerated pari 
passu. No originator of the dimensions of Helmholtz was 
produced, but a herd of diligent and thorough workers-out of 
the ideas got from England — like the aniline dyes — or from 
France — like the Wassermann tests — and seldom credited 
to their sources. So poor grew the academic tone at Berlin 
that a Munich professor declined an offer of promotion 
thither. 

For forty years German school children and university 
students sat in the thickening fumes that exhaled from 
Berlin, spread everywhere by professors chosen at the foun- 
talnhead. Any professor or editor who dared speak anything 
not dictated by Prussia, for German credulity to write down 
on its slate, was dealt with as a heretic. 

Out of the fumes emerged three colossal shapes — the 
Super-man, the Super-race and the Super-state: the new 
Trinity of German worship. 



212 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

X 

Thus was Germany shut In from the world. Even her 
SociaHst-Democrats abjectly conformed. China built a 
stone wall, Germany a wall of the mind. 

To assert that any great nation has in these modern days 
deliberately built around herself such a wall, may seem an 
extreme statement, and I will therefore support it with an 
instance — only one instance out of many, out of hundreds; 
it will suffice to indicate the sort of information about the 
world lying outside the wall that Germany has carefully 
prepared for the children in her schools. I quote from the 
letter of an American parent recently living in Berlin, who 
placed his children in a school there: "The text books were 
unique. I suppose there was not In any book of physics or 
chemistry that they studied an admission that a citizen of 
some other country had taken any forward step; every step 
was by- some line of argument assigned to a German. As you 
might expect, the history of the modern world is the work of 
German Heroes. The oddest example, however, was the 
geography used by Katherine. (His daughter, aged thirteen.) 
This contained maps indicating the Deutsche Gebiete (the 
German 'spheres of Influence' In foreign lands) In striking 
colors. In North and South America, including the United 
States and Canada, there are said to be three classes of 
inhabitants — negroes, Indians and Germans. For the United 
States there is a black belt for negroes and a middle-west 
section for Indians; but the rest Is Deutsche Gebiete. Canada 
is occupied mainly by Indians. The matter was brought to 
my attention because one of Katherlne's girl friends asked 
her whether she was of negro or Indian blood; and when she 
replied she was neither her friend pointed out that this was 
impossible for she surely was not German." Information less 
laughable about the morals taught in the German schools I 
forbear to quote. 

During forty years Germany sat within her wall, learning 
and repeating Prussian incantations. It recalls those savage 
rites where the participants, by shouting and by concerted 
rhythmic movements, work themselves Into a frothing state. 
This has befallen Germany. Within her wall of moral Isola- 
tion her sight has grown distorted, her sense of proportion is 



AMERICA 213 

lost; a set of reeling delusions possesses her — her own great- 
ness, her mission of Kultur, her contempt for the rest of 
mankind, her grievance that mankind is in league to cramp 
and suppress her. 

These delusions have been attended by their proper 
Nemesis: Germany has misunderstood us all — everybody 
and everything outside her wall. 

Like the bewitched dwarfs in certain old magic tales, 
whose talk reveals their evil without their knowing it, Ger- 
mans constantly utter words of the most naif and grotesque 
self-betrayal — as when the German ambassador was being 
escorted away from England and was urged by his escort not 
to be so downcast; the war being no fault of his. He answered 
in sincere sadness: 

"Oh, you don't realize! My future is broken. I was sent 
to watch England and tell my Emperor the right moment 
for him to strike, when England's internal disturbances would 
make it Impossible for her to fight us. I told him the moment 
had come." ^ 

Or again, when a German in Brussels said to an American: 

"We were sincerely sorry for Belgium; but we feel it is 
better for that country to suffer, even to disappear, than for 
our Empire, so much larger and more important, to be tor- 
pedoed by our treacherous enemies." 

Or again, when Doctor Dernburg shows us why Germany 
had to murder eleven hundred passengers: 

"It has been the custom heretofore to take off passengers 
and crew. . . . But a submarine . . . cannot do it. The 
submarine is a frail craft and may easily be rammed, and a 
speedy ship Is capable of running away from It." 

No more than the dwarf has Germany any conception 
what such candid words reveal of herself to ears outside her 
Teutonic wall— that she has walked back to the morality of 
the Stone Age and made ancient warfare more hideous 
through the devices of modern science. 

Thus her Nemesis is to misunderstand the world. She 
blundered as to what Belgium would do, what France would 
do, what Russia would do; and she most desperately blun- 
dered as to what England would do. And she expected Amer- 
ican sympathy. 

1 Contrast this with Lichnowsky's memorandum, above. 



214 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Summarized thus, the Prussianizing of Germany seems 
fantastic; fantastic, too, and not of the real world, the utter 
credulity, the abject, fervent faith of the hypnotized young 
men. Yet here are a young German's recent words. I have 
seen his letter, written to a friend of mine. He was tutor to 
my friend's children. Delightful, of admirable education, 
there was no sign in him of hypnotism. He went home to 
fight. There he inhaled afresh the Prussian fumes. Presently 
his letter came, just such a letter as one would wish from an 
ardent, sincere, patriotic youth — for the first pages. Then 
the fumes show their work and he suddenly breaks out in 
the following intellectual vertigo: 

"Individual life has become worthless; even the un- 
educated men feel that something greater than individual 
happiness is at stake, and the educated know that it is the 
culture of Europe. By her shameless lies and cold-blooded 
hypocrisy England has forfeited her claim to the title of a 
country of culture. France has passed her prime anyway, 
your country is too far behind in its development, the other 
countries are too small to carry on the heritage of Greek 
culture and Christian faith — the two main components of 
every higher culture to-day; so we have to do it, and we 
shall do it — even if we and millions more of us should have 
to die." 

There you have it! A cultivated student, a noble nature, a 
character of promise, Prussianized, with millions like him, 
into a gibbering maniac, and flung into a caldron of blood! 
Could tragedy be deeper.'' Goethe's young Wilhelm Meister 
thus images the ruin of Hamlet's mind and how it came 
about: "An oak tree is planted in a costly vase, which 
should only have borne beautiful flowers in its bosom; the 
roots expand and the vase is shattered." Thus has Prussia, 
planted in Germany, cracked the Empire. 

XI 

And now we are ready for the Prussian Creed. The follow- 
ing is an embodiment, a composite statement, of Prussian- 
ism, compiled sentence by sentence from the utterances of 
Prussians, the Kaiser and his generals, professors, editors, 
and Nietzsche, part of it said in cold blood, years before this 



AMERICA 2IS 

war, and all of it a declaration of faith now being ratified by 
action: 

"We Hohenzollerns take our crown from God alone. On 
me the Spirit of God has descended. I regard my whole . . . 
task as appointed by heaven. Who opposes me I shall crush 
to pieces. Nothing must be settled in this world without the 
intervention . . . of . . . the German Emperor. He who 
listens to public opinion runs a danger of inflicting immense 
harm on . . . the State. When one occupies certain positions 
in the world one ought to make dupes rather than friends. 
Christian morality cannot be political. Treaties are only a 
disguise to conceal other political aims. Remember that the 
German people are the chosen of God. 

"Might is right and ... is decided by war. Every youth 
who enters a beer-drinking and dueling club will receive the 
true direction of his life. War in itself is a good thing. God 
will see to it that war always recurs. The efforts directed 
toward the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, 
but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe is only a 
secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one good; 
the infliction of suffering docs one more good. This war must 
be conducted as ruthlessly as possible. 

"The Belgians should not be shot dead. They should be 
... so left as to make impossible all hope of recovery. 
The troops are to treat the Belgian civil population with 
unrelenting severity and frightfulness. Weak nations have 
not the same right to live as powerful . . . nations. The 
world has no longer need of little nationalities. We Germans 
have little esteem and less respect . . . for Holland. We 
need to enlarge our colonial possessions; such territorial ac- 
quisitions we can only realize at the cost of other states. 

"Russia must no longer be our frontier. The Polish press 
should be annihilated . . . likewise the French and Dan- 
ish. . . . The Poles should be allowed . . . three privileges: 
to pay taxes, serve in the army, and shut their jaws. France 
must be so completely crushed that she will never again cross 
our path. You must remember that we have not come to 
make war on the French people, but to bring them the higher 
Civilization. The French have shown themselves decadejnt 
and without respect for the Divine law. Against England 
we fight for booty. Our real enemy is England. We have 



2i6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

to . . . crush absolutely perfidious Albion . . . subdue her 
to such an extent that her influence all over the world is 
broken forever. 

"German should replace English as the world language. 
English, the bastard tongue . . . must be swept into the 
remotest corners . . . until it has returned to its original 
elements of an insignificant pirate dialect. The German 
language acts as a blessing which, coming direct from the 
hand of God, sinks into the heart like a precious balm. To us, 
more than any other nation, is Intrusted the true structure 
of human existence. Our own country, by employing military 
power, has attained a degree of Culture which it could never 
have reached by peaceful means. 

"The civilization of mankind suflFers every time a German 
becomes an American. Let us drop our miserable attempts 
to excuse Germany's action. We willed it. Our might shall 
create a new law in Europe. It Is Germany that strikes. 
We are morally and intellectually superior beyond all com- 
parison. , . . We must . . . fight with Russian beasts, 
English mercenaries and Belgian fanatics. We have nothing 
to apologize for. It is no consequence whatever if all the 
monuments ever created, all the pictures ever painted, all 
the buildings ever erected by the great architects of the 
world, be destroyed. . . . The ugliest stone placed to mark 
the burial of a German grenadier is a more glorious monu- 
ment than all the cathedrals of Europe put together. No 
respect for the tombs of Shakespeare, Newton and Faraday. 

"They call us barbarians. What of It.f* The German claim 
must be: . . . Education to hate. . . . Organization of 
hatred. . . . Education to the desire for hatred. Let us 
abolish unripe and false shame. . . . To us is given faith, 
hope and hatred; but hatred is the greatest among them." 

XII 

Can the splendid land of Goethe unlearn its Prussian les- 
son and regain its own noble sanity, or has it too long inhaled 
the fumes .^ There Is no saying yet. Still they sit Inside their 
wall. Like a trained chorus they still repeat that England 
made the war, that Louvain was not destroyed, that Rhelms 
was not bombarded, that their Fatherland is the unoffending 



AMERICA 217 

victim of world-jealousy. When travelers ask what proofs 
they have, the trained chorus has but one reply: "Our gov- 
ernment ofRcials tell us so." Berlin, Cologne, Munich — all 
their cities — give this answer to the traveler. Nothing that 
we know do they know. It is kept from them. Their brains 
still wear the Prussian uniform and go mechanically through 
the Prussian drill. Will adversity lift this curse.'' 

Something happened at Louvain — a little thing, but let it 
give us hope. In the house of a professor at the University 
some German soldiers were quartered, friendly, considerate, 
doing no harm. Suddenly one day, in obedience to new orders, 
they fell on this home, burned books, wrecked rooms, de- 
stroyed the house and all its possessions. Its master is dead. 
His wife, looking on with her helpless children, saw a soldier 
give an apple to a child. 

"Thank you," she said; "you, at least, have a heart." 
"No, madam," said the German; "it is broken." 
Goethe said: "He who wishes to exert a useful influence 
must be careful to Insult nothing. . . . We are become too 
humane to enjoy the triumphs of Csesar." Ninety years 
after he said this Germany took the Belgian women from 
their ruined villages — some of these women being so Infirm 
that for months they had not been out-of-doors — and loaded 
them on trains like cattle, and during several weeks exposed 
them publicly to the jeers and scoffs and Insults of German 
crowds through city after city. 

Perhaps the« German soldier whose heart was broken by 
Louvain will be one of a legion, and thus, perhaps, through 
thousands of broken German hearts, Germany may become 
herself again. She has hurled calamity on a continent. She 
has struck to pieces a Europe whose very unpreparedness an- 
swers her ridiculous falsehood that she was attacked first. 
Never shall Europe be again as it was. Our brains, could they 
take In the whole of this war, would burst. 

But Calamity has Its Pentecost. When its mighty wind 
rushed over Belgium and France, and Its tongues of fire 
sat on each of them, they, too, like the apostles in the New 
Testament, began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance. 
Their words and deeds have filled the world with a splendor 
the world had lost. The flesh, that has dominated our day 
and generation, fell away in the presence of the Spirit. I have 



2i8 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

heard Belgians bless the martyrdom and awakening of their 
nation. They have said: 

"Do not talk of our suffering; talk of our glory. We have 
found ourselves." 

Frenchmen have said to me: "For forty-four years we 
have been unhappy, in darkness, without health, without 
faith, believing the true France dead. Resurrection has come 
to us." I heard the French Ambassador, Jules Jusserand, 
say in a noble speech: "George Eliot profoundly observes 
that to every man comes a crisis when in a moment, without 
chance for reflection, he must decide and act instantly. What 
determines his decision.'' His whole past,, the daily choices 
between good and evil that he has made throughout his 
previous years — these determine his decision. Such a crisis 
fell in a moment on France; she acted instantly, true to her 
historic honor and courage." 

Every day deeds of faith, love and renunciation are done 
by the score and the hundred which will never be recorded, 
and every one of which is noble enough to make an immortal 
song. All over the broken map of Europe, through stricken 
thousands of square miles, such deeds are being done by 
Servians, Russians, Poles, Belgians, French and English, — 
yes, and Germans too, — the souls of men and women rising 
above their bodies, flinging them away for the sake of a cause. 
Think of one incident only, only one of the white-hot gleams 
of the Spirit that have reached us from the raging furnace. 
Out from the burning cathedral of Rheims they were dragging 
the wounded German prisoners lying helpless inside on straw 
that had begun to burn. In front of the church the French 
mob was about to shoot or tear to pieces those crippled, de- 
fenseless enemies. You and I might well want to kill an 
enemy who had set fire to Mount Vernon, the house of the 
Father of our Country. 

For more than seven hundred years that great church of 
Rheims had been the sacred shrine of France. One minute 
more and those Germans lying or crawling outside the church 
door would have been destroyed by the furious people. 
But above the crash of rafters and glass, the fall of statues, 
the thunder of bombarding cannon, and the cries of French 
execration, rose one man's voice. There on the steps of the 
ruined church stood a priest. He lifted his arms and said: 



AMERICA 219 

" Stop ; remember the ancient ways and chivalry of France. 
It is not Frenchmen who trample on a maimed and fallen foe. 
Let us not descend to the level of our enemies." 

It was enough. The French remembered France. Those 
Germans were conveyed in safety to their appointed shelter — 
and far away, across the lands and oceans, hearts throbbed 
and eyes grew wet that had never looked on Rheims. 

These are the tongues of fire; this is the Pentecost of 
Calamity. Often it must have made brothers again of those 
who found themselves prone on the battlefield, neighbors 
awaiting the grave. In Flanders a French officer of cavalry, 
shot through the chest, lay dying, but with life enough still 
to write his story to the lady of his "heart. He wrote thus: 

There are two other men lying near me, and I do not 
think there is much hope for them either. One is an officer 
of a Scottish regiment and the other a private in the uhlans. 
They were struck down after me, and when I came to my- 
self I found them bending over me, rendering first aid. The 
Britisher was pouring water down my throat from his 
flask, while the German was endeavoring to stanch my 
wound with an antiseptic preparation served out to their 
troops by the medical corps. The Highlander had one of 
his legs shattered, and the German had several pieces of 
shrapnel buried in his side. 

"In spite of their own sufferings, they were trying to help 
me; and when I was fully conscious again the German gave 
us a morphia injection and took one himself. His medical 
corps had also provided him with the injection and the 
needle, together with printed instructions for their use. After 
the injection, feeling wonderfully at ease, we spoke of the 
lives we had lived before the war. We all spoke English, and 
we talked of the women we had left at home. Both the Ger- 
man and the Britisher had been married only a year. . . . 

"I wondered — and I suppose the others did — why we 
had fought each other at all. I looked at the Highlander, 
who was falling to sleep, exhausted, and, in spite of his drawn 
face and mud-stained uniform, he looked the embodiment 
of freedom. Then I thought of the Tricolor of France and 
all that France had done for liberty. Then I watched the 
German, who had ceased to speak. He had taken a prayer 
book from his knapsack, and was trying to read a service 



220 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

for soldiers wounded in battle. And . . . while I watched 
him I realized what we were fighting for. . . . He was 
dying in vain, while the Britisher and myself, by our deaths, 
would probably contribute something toward the cause of 
civilization and peace." 

Thus wrote this young French officer of cavalry to the 
lady of his heart, the American lady to whom he was engaged. 
The Red Cross found the letter at his side. Through it she 
learned the manner of his death. This, too, is the Pentecost 
of Calamity. 

XIII 

And what do the women say — the women who lose such 
men.'* Thus do they decline to attend at The Hague the Peace 
Congress of foolish women who have lost nobody: 

"How would it be possible, in an hour like this, for us 
to meet women of the enemy's countries.'* . . . Have they 
disavowed the . . . crimes of their government.'' Have they 
protested against the violation of Belgium's neutrality.'* 
Against offenses to the law of nations.'' Against the crimes 
of their army and navy.^ If their voices had been raised it 
was too feebly for the echo of their protest to reach us across 
our violated and devastated territories. . . ." 

And one celebrated lady writes to a delegate at The Hague: 

"Madam, are you really English.'* ... I confess I under- 
stand better Englishwomen who wish to fight. . . . To ask 
Frenchwomen in such an hour to come and talk of arbitra- 
tion and mediation and discourse of an armistice is to ask 
them to deny their nation. . . . All that Frenchwomen 
could desire is to awake and acclaim in their children, their 
husbands and brothers, and in their very fathers, the con- 
viction that defensive war is a thing so holy that all must be 
abandoned, forgotten, sacrificed, and death must be faced he- 
roically to defend and save that which is most sacred . . . 
our country. ... It would be to deny my dead to look for 
anything beside that which is and ought to be! — if the God 
of right and justice, the enemy of the devil and of force and 
crazy pride, is the true God." 

Thus awakened and transfigured by Calamity do men 
and women rise in their full spiritual nature, efface them- 
selves, and utter sacred words. Calamity, when the Lusitania 



AMERICA 221 

went down, wrung from the lips of an awakened German, 
Kuno Francke, this noble burst of patriotism: 

Ends Europe so? Then, in Thy mercy, God, 
Out of the foundering pla7iet''s gruesome night 
Pluck Thou my people^ s soul. From rage and craze 
Of the staled Earth, lift Thou it aloft, 
Re-youthed, and through' transfigtiration cleansed; 
So beaming shall it light the nezver time. 
And heavenly, on a world refreshed, unfold. 
Soul of my race, thou sinkest not to dust. 

If Germany's tragedy be, as I think, the deepest of all, 
the hope is that she, too, will be touched by the Pentecost 
of Calamity, and pluck her soul from Prussia, to whom she 
gave It In 1870. Thus shall the curse be lifted. 



(b) SYMPATHY WITH ENGLAND 

HELEN G. CONE: A CHANT OF LOVE FOR ENGLAND 

(1915) 

A SONG of hate Is a song of Hell; 
Some there be that sing It well. 
Let them sing it loud and long, 
We lift our hearts in a loftier song: 
We lift our hearts to Heaven above. 
Singing the glory of her we love, — 
England! 

Glory of thought and glory of deed. 
Glory of Hampden and Runnymede; 
Glory of ships that sought far goals, 
Glory of swords and glory of souls! 
Glory of songs mounting as birds, 
Glory Immortal of magical words; 
Glory of Milton, glory of Nelson, 
Tragical glory of Gordon and Scott; 
Glory of Shelley, glory of Sidney, 
^ Glory transcendent that perishes not, — 
Hers is the story, hers be the glory, 
England. 



222 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Shatter her beauteous breast ye may; 
The spirit of England none can slay! 
Dash the bomb on the dome of Paul's — 
Deem ye the fame of the Admiral falls? 
Pry the stone from the chancel floor, — 
Dream ye that Shakespeare shall live no more? 
Where is the giant shot that kills 
Wordsworth walking the old green hills? 
Trample the red rose on the ground, — 
Keats is Beauty while earth spins round! 
Bind her, grind her, burn her with fire, 
Cast her ashes into the sea, — 
She shall escape, she shall aspire, 
She shall arise to make men free: 
She shall arise in a sacred scorn. 
Lighting the lives that are yet unborn; 
Spirit supernal, Splendor eternal, 
England! 



(c) "THE WORLD MUST BE MADE SAFE FOR 
DEMOCRACY" 

WOODROW WILSON: THE WAR MESSAGE (April 2, 1917.) 

Gentlemen of the Congress: I have called the Con- 
gress into extraordinary session because there are serious, 
very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made im- 
mediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally 
permissible that I should assume the responsibility of mak- 
ing. 

On the 3d of February last I officially laid before you the 
extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Gov- 
ernment that on and after the first day of February it was 
its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity 
and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to 
approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or 
tlie western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled 
by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean. That 
had seemed to be the object of the German submarine war- 
fare earlier in the war, but since April of last year the Im- 



AMERICA 223 

perial Government had somewhat restrained the command- 
ers of its undersea craft, in conformity with its promise, then 
given to us, that passenger boats should not be sunk and 
that due warning would be given to all other vessels which 
its submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance 
was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their 
crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in 
their open boats. The precautions taken were meager and 
haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance 
after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly busi- 
ness, but a certain degree of restraint was observed. 

The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels 
of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their 
cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly 
sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of 
help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neu- 
trals along with those of belligerents. Even hospital ships 
and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken 
people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with 
safe conduct through the proscribed areas by the German 
Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable 
marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless 
lack of compassion or of principle. 

I was for a little while unable to believe that such things 
would in fact be done by any Government that had hitherto 
subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations. 
International law had its origin in the attempt to set up 
some law which would be respected and observed upon the 
seas, where no nation had right of dominion and where lay 
the free highways of the world. By painful stage after stage 
has that law been built up, with meager enough results, 
indeed, after all was accomplished that could be accom- 
plished, but always with a clear view, at least, of what the 
heart and conscience of mankind demanded. 

This minimum of right the German Government has 
swept aside, under the plea of retaliation and necessity and 
because it had no weapons which it could use at sea except 
these, which it is impossible to employ, as it is employing 
them, without throwing to the wind all scruples of humanity 
or of respect for the understandings that were supposed to 
underlie the intercourse of the world. 



224 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, 
immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and 
wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants, men, 
women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have al- 
ways, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been 
deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; 
the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. 

The present German submarine warfare against com- 
merce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against 
all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives 
taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn 
of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly 
nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in 
the same way. There has been no discrimination. The chal- 
lenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself 
how It will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must 
be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness 
of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a 
nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will 
not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical 
might of the Nation, but only the vindication of right, of 
human right, of which we are only a single champion. 

When I addressed the Congress on the 26th of February 
last I thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral 
rights with arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful 
interference, our right to keep our people safe against un- 
lawful violence. But armed neutrality, it now appears, is 
impracticable. Because submarines are In effect outlaws, 
when used as the German submarines have been used against 
merchant shipping, It Is Impossible to defend ships against 
their attacks, as the law of nations has assumed that mer- 
chantmen would defend themselves against privateers or 
cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open sea. It is 
common prudence in such circumstances, grim necessity, in- 
deed, to endeavor to destroy them before they have shown 
their own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if 
dealt with at all. 

The German Government denies the right of neutrals to 
use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has pro- 
scribed, even In the defense of rights which no modern pub- 
licist has ever before questioned their right to defend. The 



AMERICA 225 

intimation is conveyed that the armed guards which we have 
placed on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the 
pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be. 
Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best; in such cir- 
cumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse 
than ineffectual; It Is likely only to produce what it was 
meant to prevent; it Is practically certain to draw us into 
the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of bellig- 
erents. There Is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable 
of making: we will not choose the path of submission and 
suffer the most sacred rights of our Nation and our people 
to be Ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now 
array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very 
roots of human life. 

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical 
character of the step I am taking and of the grave respon- 
sibilities which It Involves, but In unhesitating obedience to 
what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Con- 
gress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Gov- 
ernment to be In fact nothing less than war against the Gov- 
ernment and people of the United States; that it formally 
accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust 
upon It; and that it take immediate steps not only to put 
the country In a more thorough state of defense, but also to 
exert all Its power and employ all its resources to bring the 
Government of the German Empire to terms and end the 
war. 

What this will Involve is clear. It will involve the utmost 
practicable co-operation in counsel and action with the Gov- 
ernments now at war with Germany, and, as Incident to that, 
the extension to those Governments of the most liberal 
financial credits. In order that our resources may so far as 
possible be added to theirs. 

It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the 
material resources of the country to supply the materials of 
war and serve the incidental needs of the nation In the most 
abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way 
possible. 

It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy 
in all respects, but particularly in supplying it with the best 
means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. 



226 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

It will Involve the immediate addition to the armed forces 
of the United States, already provided for by law in case of 
war, of at least five hundred thousand men who should, in my 
opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability 
to service, and also the authorization of subsequent addi- 
tional increments of equal force so soon as they may be 
needed and can be handled in training. 

It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate 
credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they 
can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by 
well-conceived taxation. 

I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation, be- 
cause it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the 
credits, which will now be necessary, entirely on money bor- 
rowed. It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect 
our people, so far as we may, against the very serious hard- 
ships and evils which would be likely to arise out of the in- 
flation which would be produced by vast loans. 

In carrying out the measures by which these things are to 
be accomplished, we should keep constantly in mind the wis- 
dom of interfering as little as possible in our own prepara- 
tion and in the equipment of our own military forces with 
the duty — for it will be a very practical duty — of supplying 
the nations already at war with Germany with the materials 
which they can obtain only from us or by our assistance. 
They are In the field and we should help them in every way 
to be effective there. 

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the several 
executive departments of the Government, for the considera- 
tion of your committees, measures for the accomplishment 
of the several objects I have mentioned. I hope that it will be 
your pleasure to deal with them as having been framed after 
very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon 
whom the responsibility of conducting the war and safe- 
guarding the Nation will most directly fall. 

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, 
let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world, 
what our motives and our objects are. My own thought has 
not been driven from its habitual and normal course by the 
unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not believe 
that the thought of the Nation has been altered or clouded 



AMERICA 227 

by them. I have exactly the same things In mind now that I 
had in mind when I addressed the Senate on the 22d of 
January last; the same that I had in mind when I addressed 
the Congress on the 3d of February and on the 26th of 
February. Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the prin- 
ciples of peace and justice in the life of the world as against 
selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really 
free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of 
purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observ- 
ance of those principles. 

Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the 
peace of the world is Involved and the freedom of its peo- 
ples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies In the 
existence of autocratic Governments, backed by organized 
force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the 
will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in 
such circumstances. We are at the beginning of an age In 
which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct 
and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among 
nations and their Governments that are observed among 
the individual citizens of civilized States. 

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no 
feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It 
was not upon their Impulse that their Government acted In 
entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge 
or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to 
be determined upon In the old, unhappy days, when peoples 
were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were pro- 
voked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little 
groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their 
fellowmen as pawns and tools. 

Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor States with 
spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical 
posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to 
strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully 
worked out only under cover and where no one has the right 
to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception 
or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to genera- 
tion, can be worked out and kept from the light only within 
the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded con- 
fidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily 



228 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon 
full information concerning all the Nation's affairs. 

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained ex- 
cept b^ a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic 
Government could be trusted to keep faith within it or ob- 
serve its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partner- 
ship of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plot- 
tings of inner circles who could plan what they would and 
render account to no one would be a corruption seated at 
its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and 
their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests 
of mankind to any narrow interest of their own. 

Does not every American feel that assurance has been 
added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the 
wonderful and heartening things that have been happening 
within the last few weeks in Russia.^ Russia was known by 
those who knew it best to have been always in fact demo- 
cratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all 
the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their 
natural instinct, their habitual attitude toward life. The au- 
tocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, 
long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its 
power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or pur- 
pose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous 
Russian people have been added, in all their naive majesty 
and might, to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the 
world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a 
league of honor. 

One of the things that has served to convince us that the 
Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is 
that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our 
unsuspecting communities, and even our offices of govern- 
ment, with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot 
against our National unity of counsel, our peace within and 
without, our Industries and our commerce. Indeed, it is now 
evident that its spies were here even before the war began; 
and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture, but a fact 
proved in our courts of justice, that the intrigues, which 
have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the 
peace and dislocating the industries of the country, have 
been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and 



AMERICA 229 

even under the personal direction of official agents of the 
Imperial Government, accredited to the Government of the 
United States. 

Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate 
them we have sought to put the most generous interpreta- 
tion possible upon them because we knew that their source 
lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German 
people toward us (who were, no doubt, as ignorant of them 
as we ourselves were), but only in the selfish designs of a 
Government that did what it pleased and told its people 
nothing. But they have played their part in serving to con- 
vince us at last that that Government entertains no real 
friendship for us, and means to act against our peace and se- 
curity at its convenience. That it means to stir up enemies 
against us at our very doors the intercepted note to the Ger- 
man Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence. 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because 
we know that in such a Government, following such methods, 
we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its 
organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we 
know not what purpose, there can be no assured security 
for the democratic Governments of the world. We are now 
about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to lib- 
erty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the 
nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. 
We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false 
pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of 
the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German 
peoples included; for the rights of nations, great and small, 
and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way 
of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for 
democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested 
foundations of political liberty. 

We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, 
no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no ma- 
terial compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. 
We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. 
We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as 
secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them. 

Just because we fight without rancor and without selfish 
object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish 



230 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel confident, con- 
duct our operations as belligerents without passion and our- 
selves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right 
and of fair play we profess to be fighting for. 

I have said nothing of the Governments allied with the 
Imperial Government of Germany because they have not 
made war upon us or challenged us to defend our right and 
our honor. The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, 
avowed its unqualified endorsement and acceptance of the 
reckless and lawless submarine warfare, adopted now with- 
out disguise by the Imperial German Government, and it has 
therefore not been possible for this Government to receive 
Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to 
this Government by the Imperial and Royal Government of 
Austria-Hungary; but that Government has not actually 
engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on 
the seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, 
of postponing a discussion of our relations with the authori- 
ties at Vienna. 'We enter this war only where we are clearly 
forced into it because there are no other means of defending 
our rights. 

It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as bellig- 
erents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act 
without animus, not with enmity toward a people or with 
the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, 
but only an armed opposition to an irresponsible Govern- 
ment which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity 
and of right and is running amuck. 

We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German 
people, and shall desire nothing so much as the early re- 
establishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage 
between us, however hard it may be for them for the time 
being to believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We have 
borne with their present Government through all these bitter 
months because of that friendship, exercising a patience and 
forbearance which would otherwise have been impossible. 

We shall happily still have an opportunity to prove that 
friendship in our daily attitude and actions toward the mil- 
lions of men and women of German birth and native sympa- 
thy who live among us and share our life, and we shall be 
proud to prove it toward all who are in fact loyal to their 



AMERICA 231 

neighbors and to the Government in the hour of test. They 
are most of them as true and loyal Americans as if they had 
never known any other fealty or allegiance. They will be 
prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the 
few who may be of a different mind and purpose. If there 
should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of 
stern repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it 
only here and there and without countenance except from a 
lawless and malignant few. 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen of the 
Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. 
There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacri- 
fice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peace- 
ful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of 
all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. 

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall 
fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our 
hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to 
authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the 
rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion 
of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace 
and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. 

To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, 
everything that we are and everything that we have, with 
the pride of those who know that the day has come when 
America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for 
the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the 
peace which she has treasured. 

God helping her, she can do no other. 

WOODROW WILSON: THE PROGRAM OF THE WORLD'S 
PEACE (January 8, 191 8.) 

Once more, as repeatedly before, the spokesmen of the 
Central Empires have indicated their desire to discuss the 
objects of the war and the possible bases of a general peace. 
Parleys have been in progress at Brest-LItovsk between 
Russian representatives and representatives of the Central 
Powers to which the attention of all the belligerents has 
been invited for the purpose of ascertaining whether it may 
be possible to extend these parleys into a general conference 
with regard to terms of peace and settlement. 



232 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

The Russian representatives presented not only a per- 
fectly definite statement of the principles upon which they 
would be willing to conclude peace, but also an equally 
definite programme of the concrete application of those 
principles. 

The representatives of the Central Powers, on their part, 
presented an outline of settlement which, if much less def- 
inite, seemed susceptible of liberal interpretation until their 
specific programme of practical terms was added. 

That programme proposed no concessions at all, either to 
the sovereignty of Russia or to the preferences of the pop- 
ulation with whose fortunes it dealt, but meant, in a word, 
that the Central Empires were to keep every foot of terri- 
tory their armed forces had occupied — every province, every 
city, every point of vantage — as a permanent addition to 
their territories and their power. 

It is a reasonable conjecture that the general principles 
of settlement which they at first suggested originated with 
the more liberal statesmen of Germany and Austria, the 
men who have begun to feel the force of their own people's 
thought and purpose, while the concrete terms of actual 
settlement came from the military leaders, who have no 
thought but to keep what they have got. The negotiations 
have been broken off. The Russian representatives were 
sincere and in earnest. They cannot entertain such pro- 
posals of conquest and domination. 

The whole incident is full of significance. It is also full 
of perplexity. With whom are the Russian representatives 
dealing.'* For whom are the representatives of the Central 
Empires speaking.? Are they speaking for the majorities of 
their respective parliaments or for the minority parties — 
that military and imperialistic minority which has so far 
dominated their whole policy and controlled the affairs of 
Turkey and the Balkan States, which have felt obliged to 
become their associates in this war.^" 

The Russian representatives have insisted, very justly, 
very wisely, and in the true spirit of democracy, that the 
conferences they have been holding with the Teutonic and 
Turkish statesmen should be held within open, not closed, 
doors, and all the world has been audience, as was desired. 

To whom have we been listening, then.'' To those who 



AMERICA 233 

speak the spirit and Intention of the resolutions of the Ger- 
man Reichstag of the 9th of July last, the spirit and inten- 
tion of the liberal leaders and parties of Germany, or to 
those who resist and defy that spirit and intention and Insist 
upon conquest and subjugation? Or are we listening In fact 
to both, unreconciled and In open and hopeless contradic- 
tion? These are very serious and pregnant questions. Upon 
the answer to them depends the peace of the world. 

But whatever the results of the parleys at Brest-LItovsk, 
whatever the confusions of counsel and of purpose In the 
utterances of the spokesmen of the Central Empires, they 
have again attempted to acquaint the world with their 
objects in the war and have again challenged their adver- 
saries to say what their objects are and what sort of settle- 
ment they would deem jyist and satisfactory. 

There Is no good reaso'n why that challenge should not be 
responded to, and responded to with the utmost candor. 
We did not wait for It. Not once, but again and again, we 
have laid our whole thought and purpose before the world, 
not in general terms only, but each time with sufficient 
definition to make it clear what sort of definitive terms of 
settlement must necessarily spring out of them. 

Within the last week Mr. Lloyd George has spoken with 
admirable candor and In admirable spirit for the people 
and Government of Great Britain. There Is no confusion of 
counsel among the adversaries of the Central Powers, no 
uncertainty of principle, no vagueness of detail. 

The only secrecy of counsel, the only lack of fearless 
frankness, the only failure to make definite statement of 
the objects of the war lies with Germany and her allies. The 
issues of life and death hang upon these definitions. No 
statesman who has the least conception of his responsibility 
ought for a moment to permit himself to continue this trag- 
ical and appalling outpouring of blood and treasure unless 
he is sure beyond a peradventure that the objects of the 
vital sacrifice are part and parcel- of the very life of society 
and that the people for whom he speaks think them right 
and Imperative as he does. 

There Is, moreover, a voice calling for these definitions of 
principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more 
thrilling and more compelling than any of the many mov- 



234 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

ing voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. 
It is the voice of the Russian people. They are prostrate and 
all but helpless, it would seem, before the grim power of 
Germany, which has hitherto known no relenting and no 
pity. Their power apparently is shattered, and yet their soul 
is not subservient. They will not yield either in principle or in 
action. The conception of what is right, of what is humane 
and honorable for them to accept, has been stated with a 
frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit, and a 
universal human sympathy which must challenge the ad- 
miration of every friend of mankind; and they have refused 
to compound their ideals or desert others that they them- 
selves may be safe. 

They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what, 
if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ from theirs; 
and I believe that the people of the United States would 
wish me to respond with utter simplicity and frankness. 

Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our 
heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened 
whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia 
to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace. 

It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of 
peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open, and 
that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret un- 
derstandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggran- 
dizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants 
entered into in the interest of particular governments, and 
likely at some unlooked for moment to upset the peace of 
the world. 

It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every pub- 
lic man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that 
is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation 
whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace 
of the world to avow now or at any other time the objects 
it has in view. 

We entered this war because violations of right had oc- 
curred which touched us to the quick and made the life of 
our own people impossible unless they were corrected and 
the world secured once for all against their recurrence. 
What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar 
to ourselves. 



AMERICA 235 

It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and 
particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving 
nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, deter- 
mine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair 
dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force 
and selfish aggression. 

All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this 
interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless 
justice be done to others it will not be done to us. 

The programme of the world's peace, therefore, is our pro- 
gramme, and that programme, the only possible programme, 
as we see it, Is this: — 

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after 
which there shall be no private International understandings 
of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly 
and in the public view. 

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside 
territorial waters, alike In peace and In war, except as the 
seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action 
for the enforcement of international covenants. 

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic bar- 
riers and the establishment of an equality of trade condi- 
tions among all the nations consenting to the peace and 
associating themselves for Its niaintenance. 

IV. Adequate guaranties given and taken that national 
armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent 
with domestic safety. 

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjust- 
ment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance 
of the principle that In determining all such questions of 
sovereignty the Interest of the populations concerned must 
have equal weight with the equitable claims of the govern- 
ment whose title Is to be determined. 

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a 
settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure 
the best and freest co-operation of the other nations of the 
world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembar- 
rassed opportunity for the independent determination of 
her own political development and national policy and assure 
her of a sincere welcome Into the society of free nations under 
institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, 



236 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

assistance also of every kind that she may need and may 
herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister 
nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their 
good will, of their comprehension of her needs as destin- 
gulshed from their own Interests, and of their Intelligent and 
unselfish sympathy. 

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evac- 
uated and restored without any attempt to limit the sover- 
eignty which she enjoys in common with all other free 
nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to 
restore confidence among the nations In the laws which they 
have themselves set and determined for the government 
of their relations with one another. Without this healing 
act the whole structure and validity of international law is 
forever impaired. 

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the in- 
vaded portions restored and the wrong done to France by 
Prussia in 187 1 In the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has 
unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should 
be righted, in order that peace may once more be made 
secure in the interest of all. 

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be 
effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. 

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among 
the nations wc wish to see safeguarded and assured, should 
be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous develop- 
ment. 

XI. Roumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacu- 
ated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and 
secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several 
Balkan States to one another determined by friendly counsel 
along historically established lines of allegiance and nation- 
ality; and international guaranties of the political and eco- 
nomic independence and territorial Integrity of the several 
Balkan States should be entered Into. 

XII. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Em- 
pire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other 
nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be 
assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely 
unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and 
the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free 



AMERICA 237 

passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under in- 
ternational guaranties. 

XIII. An independent Polish State should be erected 
which should include the territories inhabited by indispu- 
tably Polish populations, which should be assured a free 
and secure access to the sea, and whose political and eco- 
nomic independence and territorial integrity should be guar- 
anteed by international covenant. 

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed 
under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual 
guaranties of political independence and territorial integrity 
to great and small states alike. 

In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and 
assertions of right we feel ourselves to be intimate partners 
of all the governments and peoples associated together 
against the imperialists. We cannot be separated in interest 
or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end. 

For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to 
fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but 
only, because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just 
and stable peace such as can be secured only by removing 
the chief provocations to war, which this programme does 
remove. 

We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is 
nothing in this programme that impairs it. We grudge her 
no achievement or distinction of learning or of pacific enter- 
prise such as have made her record very bright and very 
enviable. We do not wish to injure her or to block in any 
way her legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to 
fight her either with arms or with hostile arrangements of 
trade, if she is willing to associate herself with us and the 
other peace-loving nations of the world in covenants of 
justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept 
a' place of equality among the peoples of the world — the 
new world in which we now live— Instead of a place of 
mastery. 

Neither do we presume to suggest to her any alteration 
or modification of her institutions. But it is necessary, we 
must frankly say, and necessary as a preliminary to any In- 
telligent dealings with her on our part, that we should know 
whom her spokesmen speak for when they speak to us, 



238 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

whether for the Reichstag majority or for the military party 
and the men whose creed is imperial domination. 

We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete to 
admit of any further doubt or question. 

An evident principle runs through the whole programme I 
have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and 
nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty 
and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. 
Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the 
structure of international justice can stand. The people of 
the United States could act upon no other principle, and to 
the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote 
their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess. 
The moral climax of this, the culminating and final war for 
human liberty, has come, and they are ready to put their 
strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity, 
and devotion to the test. 

WOODROW WILSON: "FORCE TO THE UTMOST" 

(April 6, 1918.) 

This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Germany's 
challenge to fight for our right to live and be free, and for 
the sacred rights of free men everywhere. The Nation is 
awake. There is no need to call to it. We know what the war 
must cost, our utmost sacrifice, the lives of our fittest men 
and, if need be, all that we possess. The loan we are met to 
discuss is one of the least parts of what we are called upon 
to give and to do, though in itself imperative. The people 
of the whole country are alive to the necessity of it, and are 
ready to lend to the utmost, even where it involves a sharp 
skimping and daily sacrifice to lend out of meager earnings. 
They will look with reprobation and contempt upon those 
who can and will not, upon those who demand a higher rate 
of interest, upon those who think of it as a mere commercial 
transaction. I have not come, therefore, to urge the loan. 
I have come only to give you, if I can, a more vivid concep- 
tion of what it is for. 

The reasons for this great war, the reason why it had to 
come, the need to fight it through, and the issues that hang 
upon its outcome, are more clearly disclosed now than ever 
before. It is easy to see just what this particular loan means 



AMERICA 239 

because the cause we are fighting for stands more sharply 
revealed than at any previous crisis of the momentous strug- 
gle. The man who knows least can now see plainly how the 
cause of justice stands and what the imperishable thing is 
he is asked to invest in. Men in America may be more sure 
than they ever were before that the cause is their own, and 
that, if it should be lost, their own great Nation's place and 
mission in the world would be lost with it. 

I call you to witness, my fellow countrymen, that at no 
stage of this terrible business have I judged the purposes of 
Germany intemperately. I should be ashamed in the presence 
of affairs so grave, so fraught with the destinies of mankind 
throughout all the world, to speak with truculence, to use 
the weak language of hatred or vindictive purpose. We must 
judge as we would be judged. I have sought to learn the 
objects Germany has in this war from the mouths of her 
own spokesmen, and to deal as frankly with them as I 
wished them to deal with me, I have laid bare our own ideals, 
our own purposes, without reserve or doubtful phrase, and 
have asked them to say as plainly what it Is that they seek. 

We have ourselves proposed no injustice, no aggression. 
We are ready, whenever the final reckoning is made, to be 
just to the German people, deal fairly with the German 
power, as with all others. There can be no difference between 
peoples in the final judgment, if it is indeed to be a righteous 
judgment. To propose anything but justice, even-handed 
and dispassionate justice, to Germany at any time, what- 
ever the outcome of the war, would be to renounce and dis- 
honor our own cause. For we ask nothing that we are not 
willing to accord. 

It has been with this thought that I have sought to learn 
from those who spoke for Germany whether it was justice 
or dominion and the execution of their own will upon the 
other nations of the world that the German leaders were 
seeking. They have answered, answered in unmistakable 
terms. They have avowed that it was not justice but do- 
minion and the unhindered execution of their own will. 

The avowal has not come from Germany's statesmen. 
It has come from her military leaders, who are her real rulers. 
Her statesmen have said that they wished peace, and were 
ready to discuss its terms whenever their opponents were 



240 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

willing to sit down at the conference table with them. Her 
present Chancellor has said, — in indefinite and uncertain 
terms, indeed, and in phrases that often seem to deny their 
own meaning, but with as much plainness as he thought 
prudent, — that he believed that peace should be based upon 
the principles which we had declared would be our own in 
the final settlement. At Brest-Litovsk her civilian delegates 
spoke in similar terms; professed their desire to conclude 
a fair peace and accord to the peoples with whose fortunes 
they were dealing the right to choose their own allegiances. 
But action accompanied and followed the profession. Their 
military masters, the men who act for Germany and exhibit 
her purpose in execution, proclaimed a very different con- 
clusion. We cannot mistake what they have done, — in Russia, 
in Finland, in the Ukraine, in Roumania. The real test of 
their justice and fair play has come. From this we may judge 
the rest. They are enjoying in Russia a cheap triumph in 
which no brave or gallant nation can long take pride. A 
great people, helpless by their own act, lies for the time at 
their mercy. Their fair professions are forgotten. They no- 
where set up justice, but everywhere impose their power and 
exploit everything for their own use and aggrandizement; 
and the peoples of conquered provinces are invited to be 
free under their dominion! 

Are we not justified in believing that they would do the 
same things at their western front if they were not there 
face to face with armies whom even their countless divisions 
cannot overcome.? If, when they have felt their check to be 
final, they should propose favorable and equitable terms 
with regard to Belgium and France and Italy, could they 
blame us if we concluded that they did so only to assure 
themselves of a free hand in Russia and the East.'' 

Their purpose is undoubtedly to make all the Slavic 
peoples, all the free and ambitious nations of the Baltic 
peninsula, all the lands that Turkey has dominated and mis- 
ruled, subject to their will and ambition and build upon that 
dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy that they 
can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy, 
— an empire as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which 
it will overawe, — an empire which will ultimately master 
Persia, India, and the peoples of the Far East. In such a 



AMERICA 241 

programme our ideals, the ideals of justice and humanity and 
liberty, the principle of the free self-determination of nations 
upon which all the modern world insists, can play no part. 
They are rejected for the ideals of power, for the principle 
that the strong must rule the weak, that trade must follow 
the flag, whether those to whom it is taken welcome it or not, 
that the peoples of the world are to be made subject to the 
patronage and overlordship of those who have the power to 
enforce it. 

That programme once carried out, America and all who 
care or dare to stand with her must arm, and prepare them- 
selves to contest the mastery of the world, a mastery in 
which the rights of common men, the rights of women and 
of all who are weak, must for the time being be trodden 
under foot and disregarded, and the old, age-long struggle 
for freedom and right begin again at its beginning. Every- 
thing that America has lived for and loved and grown great 
to vindicate and bring to a glorious realization will have 
fallen in utter ruin and the gates of mercy once more piti- 
lessly shut upon mankind! 

The thing is preposterous and impossible; and yet is not 
that what the whole course and action of the German armies 
has meant wherever they have moved .f* I do not wish, even 
In this moment of utter disillusionment, to judge harshly 
or unrighteously. I judge only what the German arms have 
accomplished with unpitying thoroughness throughout every 
fair region they have touched. 

What, then, are we to do.^ For myself, I am ready, ready 
still, ready even now, to discuss a fair and just and honest 
peace at any time that it is sincerely purposed, — a peace 
in whicb.the strong and the weak shall fare alike. But the 
answer, when I proposed such a peace, came from the Ger- 
man commanders in Russia, and I cannot mistake the mean- 
ing of the answer. 

I accept the challenge. I know that you accept it. All the 
world shall know that you accept it. It shall appear in the 
utter sacrifice and self-forgetfulness with which we shall 
give all that we love and all that we have to redeem the world 
and make it fit for free men like ourselves to live in. This 
now is the meaning of all that we do. Let everything that 
we say, my fellow countrymen, everything that we hence- 



242 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

forth plan and accomplish, ring true to this response till 
the majesty and might of our concerted power shall fill the 
thought and utterly defeat the force of those who flout and 
misprize what we honor and hold dear. Germany has once 
more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether- 
justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether 
Right as America conceives it or Dominion as she conceives 
it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, there- 
fore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the 
utmost. Force without stint or limit, the righteous and 
triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the 
world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. 

VACHEL LINDSAY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN WALKS AT 
MIDNIGHT (IN SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS) 

It is portentous, and a thing of state 
That here at midnight, in our little town, 
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, 
Near the old court-house pacing up and down. 

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards 
He lingers where his children used to play; 
Or through the market, on the well-worn stones 
He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away. 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black, 
A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl 
Make him the quaint great figure that men love, 

The prairie-lawyer, master of us all. 

» 

He cannot sleep upon his hillside now. 

He is among us: — as in times before! 

And we who toss and lie awake for long 

Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door. 

His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings. 
Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep.'' 
Too many peasants fight, they know not why, 
Too many homesteads in black terror weep. 



AMERICA 243 

The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart. 
He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main. 
He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now 
The bitterness, the folly, and the pain. 

He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn 
Shall come; — the shining hope of Europe free: 
The league of sober folk, the Workers' Earth 
Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp, and Sea. 

It breaks his heart that kings must murder still. 
That all his hours of travail here for men 
Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace 
That he may sleep upon his hill again.'' 



(d) POLITICAL RECONSTRUCTION 

WILBUR C. ABBOTT: COSSACK OR REPUBLICAN.? 

(January, 191 8.) 

It has now been almost precisely a hundred years since the 
first Napoleon gave utterance to his famous prophecy that 
"in a century Europe would be all Cossack or all Repub- 
lican," — all autocracy or all democracy. The appointed 
term is nearly fulfilled, and we hang upon the answer. 
Europe itself is rent with the tremendous convulsion, which 
has risen in scope and intensity beyond all conflicts since the 
world began. The whole earth is stirring to take its part in 
a struggle which staggers the imagination, and bids fair to 
surpass the bounds of human endurance and even of human 
understanding. Shrewd as he was, not even the great em- 
peror could foresee what direction the conflict was to take, 
or predict its outcome. But standing, as he did, at the 
stupendous turning-point between the old order and the 
new — half enlightened despot, half democrat, and wholly 
child of revolution as he was, — he had prescience of the inevi- 
table contest for supremacy between those principles of lib- 
erty and absolutism of which his career was the result and 
which he, in no small degree, personified. We have arrived 



244 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

at the end of the period which he set as the limit for the final 
trial of strength— and we confront the riddle of Napoleon. 
Is it to be Cossack or Republican? 

But the problem, as the past three years have revealed 
with uncompromising clearness, Is not so simple as it was at 
first conceived, and far from as simple as the emperor imag- 
ined. For the world has moved forward since he ceased to 
dominate its destinies. There is still a widespread and power- 
ful feeling that upon the decision of arms — let us say on the 
western front — hangs the Issue between autocracy and 
democracy. In no small measure this is true; but it is not the 
whole truth. For if one inevitable conclusion above all others 
has been forced upon thinking men since this war began, it is 
that, far beyond the fighting line, there has been, and there 
still Is a conflict of forces, for the most part imponderable, 
upon which, scarcely less than upon the result of the appeal 
to arms, hangs the future of political and social affairs 
throughout the world. If the Allies are defeated, there can 
hardly be any doubt that the cause of popular government 
will receive a tremendous set-back. But even If they win, 
they will find the world about them changed in ways scarcely 
conceivable five years ago, and their armies will return to 
nations already revolutionized. The Germans, it has been 
observed, set out to alter the world, and, if they have 
not accomplished their design in the way they hoped and 
planned, even their failure will leave us in a situation and 
with a group of ideas and conditions profoundly altered from 
those with which we entered the conflict. 

Of this there are two striking instances — to choose two 
out of many. No one can reflect upon the state of affairs 
before the war without realizing that the present govern- 
ment of Germany threw away the greatest opportunity for 
world domination which any power ever had. The German 
people seemed in a fair way to conquer us all by their 
marvellous organization, their patient industry, their scien- 
tific efficiency. They had, consciously and unconsciously, 
applied the principles of autocracy, of enlightened despot- 
ism and perfected bureaucracy, to the social and economic 
side of life. They had gone far towards what they have 
come to call industrial militarism. They had established new 
standards of national and state existence, of which the army 



AMERICA 245 

was one manifestation, and the economic organization was 
the other. They were rapidly realizing an ideal of a state as a 
fighting mechanism, which went forth conquering in the 
world of business as well as that of arms. 

But the cup was dashed from their lips. At the moment 
when it seemed that they faced every prospect of success in 
this commercial conquest of the world, the short-sighted 
party of the sword proved too strong, and, for whatever 
reason, the nation plunged into war. The vast development 
of commerce and industry was not only brought to an end 
for the time being; the rest of the nations were suddenly 
awakened to a keen realization of what German industrial- 
ism had meant, and whither it was leading. They were 
not merely inspired, they were compelled, to take measures 
to readjust their economic life. In almost every department 
of industry they took steps to replace the products for which 
they had before the war trustingly, one might almost say 
confidingly, relied on Germany. And among the profoundest 
results of the present conflict will be, unquestionably, a series 
of declarations of economic independence, which will have 
the same effect in the economic world as the series of revolu- 
tions which, a century ago, brought new states into existence 
in the western hemisphere to redress the balance of the old 
European political system. 

It is no mere fancy, this extension into the field of eco- 
nomics of those principles of nationalism which have long 
since made themselves dominant in politics. Now that war 
has become industrialized, it Is apparent that, if nations are 
to retain even their political independence, they must pro- 
vide, as Germany has long since provided, not merely an 
army, but an industrial strength capable of defense against 
the aggressions of other powers in peace no less than in war, 
unless some better way be devised to assure world comity. 
And this is one of the great lessons we have learned from the 
conflict. 

The second Is not unlike the first; and It Is at once even 
more and less obvious. It lies primarily in the field of politics. 
If there Is one thing more astonishing than all others In the 
United States during the past six months, it is the extraor- 
dinary conflict we have witnessed between the principle of 
liberty and that of equality. On the face of affairs nothing 



246 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

could have seemed not merely less probable but less con- 
ceivable than any antagonism between doctrines which, to 
most men's minds, seem so correlated if not so inseparable 
as these. It has now been a hundred and thirty-eight years 
since the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia con- 
cluded its labors in forming that momentous document which 
founded a new nation and a new state, and gave to political 
theory and practice new form and new direction. At the same 
moment there gathered at Versailles that body of men 
destined to bring forth no less far-reaching changes in the 
world's affairs, to inaugurate those tremendous events which 
we know as the French Revolution. 

Both groups were dominated by the principles of the 
dreamer Rousseau, who, "ignorant of politics and society 
alike, managed somehow to revolutionize them both." Each 
group was influenced by his momentous fallacy of the social 
contract, that mythical conception of the origin of society 
and government by agreement between primitive men. 
This glittering error they transmuted into fact. They were, 
or they became, in truth,thefoundersof a new order. The one, 
filled with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, 
endeavored, in so far as the practical affairs about them per- 
mitted, to ensure " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness " 
to the members of the society whose social contract they 
drew up. More logical, perhaps more visionary, certainly 
more liberal, perhaps even more prophetic, and relieved from 
the incubus of slavery, the founders of modern France com- 
mitted themselves to their great trinity of " liberty, equality, 
and fraternity"; and, in no small measure, those principles 
became the guiding stars of the ensuing generations. 

It is not probable that any man, on either side of the water, 
conceived that there could possibly be any conflict between 
doctrines which, on their very face, seemed to be so closely 
united that they were but three expressions of the same great 
principle. Nor, until this present war began, did it seem that 
any such antagonism could exist. To men then and there- 
after it appeared that the great object to be attained was 
that liberty of the individual, that equality of opportunity, 
that open way for the talents, which is the mark of what 
we recognize to-day as a free society. Napoleon declared, 
when he ascended the imperial throne, that he came to pre- 



AMERICA 247 

serve the fruits of the Revolution; and, in no small degree, 
he was accepted on those terms. Wherever French influence 
spread, it carried with it those immortal principles. Equality 
before the law, equality in taxation, the right of free speech 
and religious toleration; however these were maimed or 
modified under the Napoleonic rule, they remained a tangible 
gain to the cause of humanity and political progress. It is in- 
deed pathetic to see how the early reformers believed that, 
were political power transferred to the people, all virtues 
would be added unto them, and government would be mi- 
raculously purified. 

But to these there was added, almost at once, another 
element. The armies of Prussia and Austria were launched 
against those daring spirits who had defied the doctrine of the 
divine right of kings, and Jacobin became a word of anath- 
ema to half Europe. By their own excess of zeal the men 
who had thrown into the arena the head of a king as a gage 
of battle to their enemies, found the number of those enemies 
increased. It was necessary, if their principles and power were 
to be maintained, that every element of strength in the na- 
tion should be thrown into the scale; and there ensued, in 
consequence, an era of absolutism such as France had never 
known. Every district, almost every individual, was called 
upon, in that supreme crisis, to sacrifice goods, if necessary 
life, for the cause. And from that fiery trial emerged a prin- 
ciple that, scarcely less than those great Ideals for which they 
fought, took its place In European life. It was the principle 
of general compulsory military service. 

It took the form of what we know as conscription; the 
choosing of a certain proportion of those capable of bearing 
arms for the military service of the state; and it was, at first, 
a measure of self-preservation. As the Continent plunged 
into a quarter of a century of conflict, this emergency expe- 
dient hardened into a rule of national life, and by its use, 
joined to the genius of Napoleon, France was enabled to con- 
front a world In arms with every prospect of success. At first 
no other states adopted it. Almost without exception they re- 
lied upon the old royal system of a professional army, with 
what recruits could be persuadedor compelled to join its ranks. 
And, one by one, they sank before French power. Such was 
the history of the first decade of the war against Napoleon. 



248 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

That period reached its cHmax with the defeat of Prussia, 
who, proud of the traditional system estabUshed by the great 
Frederick, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing in 
the generation since his death, refused to aid her neighbors, 
and courted catastrophe in her blind self-confidence. Upon 
her outworn system the blow fell at Jena, and in one day 
the army of Frederick the Great was crushed by the army 
of Napoleon. In the ensuing years Prussia reaped the bitter 
fruit of her rulers' inept and selfish policy, their fatuous 
complacency, and their obstinate reactionary spirit. And, 
had it not been for the genius of a handful of men, no one 
of them Prussian by birth, she might well have declined 
into that position of a secondary power whence Frederick's 
genius and his unscrupulousness had raised her. 

Upon the conquered state Napoleon imposed not merely 
an indemnity but a limitation of armament. Had his fore- 
sight gone one step farther, he might have gained his pur- 
pose. But, with an army restricted to some forty thousand 
men, the leaders of Prussia adopted and extended the French 
system. They added to it the principle of universal obliga- 
tion for every man capable of bearing arms, and that of 
short-term service with the colors. Thus, within a few years, 
they were able to put into the field a force virtually com- 
mensurate with the able-bodied population of the land, liter- 
ally the nation in arms. In such fashion was the modern 
system of military service born. 

It did not, indeed, extend beyond the Prussian frontiers 
for many years, and even there it played no great part for a 
full generation after the fall of Napoleon. Only when, after 
the repression of the movements towards liberalism, and the 
failure of the German revolutionary activities of 1830 and 
1848 before the strength of the Prussian arms, did there arise 
another group of men, this time chiefly Prussian by birth, 
able and daring enough to use the force thus created. In 
the twenty years between 1850 and 1870 the genius of Bis- 
marck, Moltke, and Roon enlarged, developed, and put into 
action the weapon thus forged. First Denmark, then Austria 
and her allies among the North German states, then France, 
felt the weight of Prussian ambitions backed by Prussian 
arms. Prussia became the mistress of Germany, in fact and 
name. And, seeing not only the advantage of her military 



AMERICA 249 

system, but, still more, its danger to themselves, every great 
continental state hastened to adopt her military policy; 
and the age of great national armaments began. 

Only the Anglo-Saxon powers held aloof. Among them the 
dread of military establishments was too strong, the love 
of individual, or what they knew as civil, liberty too great; 
and they remained, protected by their distance or their sea- 
power, or both, apart from this movement. To them the loss 
involved in the Prussian system seemed greater than the 
gain; and they were, almost alone among world powers, 
opposed to either conscription or universal compulsory short- 
term service. Then came the present war. Within a month 
those states which had adopted the Prussian military system 
had poured millions of men into the lighting line, millions 
more were being thrown into the second line of defense; and 
the whole strength of the peoples at war was being utilized 
in the conflict. 

Not so with England. Her tremendous resources of money 
and ships were, indeed, put at the service of her allies. Her 
little army, it is not too much to say, gave its life to check 
the onrush of the German hordes to Paris. Her navy swept 
German commerce from the seas, made the ocean a highway 
for the Allies, and began to choke the life out of the Central 
Empires. But England, like the United States, was organized 
not for war but for peace. That circumstance is to the minds 
of most civilized men the highest praise which can be be- 
stowed upon any form of society; but the result was that, 
save for the French army and the English navy, England's 
national existence would have been forfeited to her enemy. 

The results of this discovery are fresh in our minds — a 
huge campaign of education, a still huger campaign for 
volunteers, incredible mistakes, and the mismanagement 
inevitable In a democracy primarily constituted not for war 
but for peace. From that England has emerged with a great 
army, with an industrial organization transformed from a 
producer of wealth and welfare into an engine of destruc- 
tion. Her government, after desperate efforts to preserve its 
old form and function, has become attuned to the exigencies 
of self-preservation, and is a virtual despotism by popular 
consent. It has established the principle of universal service; 
it has put into effect a rigid censorship; it has taken over the 



2SO WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

means of production and distribution; and it has become, as 
it must have become, if it continued to exist at all, a highly 
centralized and all but despotic autocracy. To preserve the 
freedom of the nation, it has been obliged to sacrifice, for 
the time at least, the freedom of the individual. 

Now the same problem presents itself to us. Warned by the 
experience of our allies, the great majority of the country 
has committed this nation to the principle of conscription. 
But it has been only in the face of the vigorous opposition 
of the minority that this has been done. We have seen that 
minority opposing equality only less than the adherents of 
liberty have opposed autocracy. Upon such men, the reason 
which is derived from the bitterest of experience has been 
wasted. It is to be expected that, in a nation devoted to 
democracy, a multitude of opinions, good, bad, and what is 
worse, indifferent, should flourish. Yet the fact that the 
most obvious lesson of the war has made no impression upon 
so many minds, even though they be a relatively small minor- 
ity, argues more than the reasons given by the opposition to 
the policy of the present Administration. It argues some- 
thing more than even the charges of politics and mischievous 
pacificism which have been levelled against the champions 
of non-intervention and the volunteer system. It is partly 
due to ignorance; perhaps it is more largely due to an in- 
ability to comprehend the changes which have come over 
the world in the past fifty years. 

To, a sincere man, devoted to the principle of liberty, few 
things are more abhorrent than coercion by other than 
moral or intellectual pressure. Any democracy like ours, in 
consequence, is Infinitely more easy-going than any auto- 
cracy. We are inclined continually to let things go at loose 
ends. Especially is this true of a people which, like our own, 
is recruited from nearly every quarter of the earth. We 
are continually in fear of offending the susceptibilities of 
our neighbors. We are continually hedging, compromising, 
apologizing, until we have elevated our national virtue of 
good-natured tolerance into a vice. To it are to be ascribed 
most of the evils which, as a whole, we endure more patiently 
than any other nation of equal civilization. We have, in 
John Marshall's words, talked liberty so long that we have 
forgotten — among other things — government. Until very 



AMERICA 251 

recently, if one judged merely from surface indications, it 
might have seemed that we had forgotten that there were 
still such things in the world as right and wrong. 

The result was what might have been expected. When 
the question arose of raising forces to defend not only our 
principles but our position as a nation and the perpetuation 
of our rights, we found ourselves hampered by our tradi- 
tions, the most sacred of which was liberty. The difficulty 
which we confronted almost at once was twofold. On the 
one hand, there was that element known now to all men as 
"slackers"; on the other, there was the infringement of every 
man's right to determine for himself his relations to the 
government to which he owed allegiance. Liberty meant 
freedom not to volunteer, no less than the duty of volunteer- 
ing. As in England, the best element would hasten to the 
service of the state, the worst to their own safety or even their 
profit. Therefore, whatever liberty there was, made for 
inequality as between the conscientious and self-sacrificing 
on the one hand, and the selfish exploiters on the other. 

That was the practical problem. Behind it lay a greater 
Issue. To the men of the French Revolution, as to their fol- 
lowers since, equality meant chiefly equality of opportunity. 
To the men who reorganized Prussia, equality meant less 
equality of opportunity than equality of obligation. To us, 
as children of the same school as the French, equality meant, 
if it meant anything — for we have not been forward in talk- 
ing equality in recent years — the right to vote and have our 
votes counted, and, outside that, chiefly the right to do any- 
thing done by our fellows which was not positively con- 
demned by the courts. In the more modern sense of finance, 
it did not even mean equality of taxation. It did not dawn 
on the intelligence of most men, certainly, that liberty and 
equality, so far from being correlated phenomena, might 
possibly become the most deadly of antagonists. For we had 
considered not obligation but merely opportunity. 

Suddenly we have been awakened to the real meaning of 
the doctrines we have long professed. Unconsciously — 
doubtless, did they know the truth, most unwillingly — the 
Prussians have made us alive to the deeper meaning of our 
own belief. They have driven us to its logical conclusion. 
They have imposed upon us the equality of obligation as well 



252 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

as that of opportunity. And this much, at least, they have 
done for the great principles of the revolutionary age. They 
have repaid the hard lesson of Napoleon, with interest. 

Nor is this all. If there has been one danger more appar- 
ent than all others to those who have had the cause of popular 
rule most at heart during the past three years, it is the possi- 
bility that the peculiar situation produced by the war shall 
somehow maintain itself in the ensuing years of peace. Men 
have been dubious of democracy's ability to stand the su- 
preme test, yet fearful of losing it. Inspired advocates of 
German domination have contended that there was a sharp 
antithesis between, not liberty and autocracy, but between 
liberty and efficiency. To every argument advanced for pop- 
ular government, they opposed arguments, not for despot- 
ism, but for the superiority of Germany's form of govern- 
ment based upon that attention to detail, that organization, 
that far-sighted policy of developing national resources and 
abilities, which they conceived to be possible only under such 
government as Germany possessed, an autocratic, bureau- 
cratic imperialism. 

There was much to be said for their case — and they said it 
all. Germany was well governed, in certain particulars; it 
had grown rich and powerful; it surpassed most other states 
in a variety of ways not necessary to enumerate here. But 
why.? To the mind steeped in Prussianism there was but one 
answer possible. It was the government! To this two ob- 
jections at once present themselves. The first is that there 
are two kinds or degrees of efficiency; the one like theirs, 
which, for want of a better name, we may call mechanical; 
the other of a less tangible quality, easily recognized, but 
hard to define, the efficiency of the individual as opposed to 
the corporate efficiency of the community. It is not possible 
here — perhaps it is not possible at all — to determine which of 
these is the more to be desired. But it is very apparent that 
what we call the spirit of liberty aligns itself rather with 
individual than with communal efficiency. And to that 
school, rightly or wrongly, we belong. And the second 
answer is not unlike the first. It is that we still await the 
proof that the desirable factors in the position which the 
Germans have attained, are due wholly or even in considera- 
ble part to their form of government. That is an assumption 



AMERICA 253 

which, like too many assumptions proceeding from the same 
source, remains a dogma rather than a provable proposition. 

In the past forty-six years the German Empire, and indi- 
viduals within it, have grown rich. So has England, so has 
France, so has the United States, so has Belgium, so has 
every nation which has felt the quickening power of the 
new industrialism. Germany has built a navy, and taken her 
share of sea-going commerce — as have other states. She has 
played a part in world politics — to what end and for what 
purposes we have seen. She has acquired colonies — as have 
we all. And though it is an assumption incapable of proof 
that she would have done these same things by virtue of the 
strength and abilities of her people had the plans of the men 
of 1848 been carried out, and the nation been unified as a lib- 
eral rather than a Prussianized Germany, it is scarcely more 
of an assumption than the attribution of her recent eminence 
to the Hohenzollern dynasty. 

So stands the argument after three years of conflict and 
controversy. It is too soon to say that either side has won, 
that Europe is yet all Cossack or all Republican, It is quite 
possible that Napoleon's prophecy will not come true, which- 
ever side emerges victorious. It is impossible to say as yet 
what Germany has learned, if she has learned anything, 
from her enemies. But it is by no means improbable that 
the succeeding years will demonstrate that despotism, and 
not efficiency, is the antithesis of liberty; as it has been fully 
proved to the Allies that liberty and equality are not synon- 
ymous. It is all but inconceivable that, whatever the outcome 
of the war, those nations which have tasted the sweets of 
liberty will revert to absolutism in despair at the obvious 
difficulties of government by the people. It is not incon- 
ceivable that those which have tasted the bitter fruits of 
autocracy, with all its efficiency, may long for greater equal- 
ity of opportunity to manage the concerns in which they are 
so deeply interested, and be willing to exchange some of that 
equality of obligation, to which they have sacrificed so 
much, for the right to make their own mistakes. 

It is not probable, therefore, that we shall see Europe all 
Cossack or all Republican. It is far more probable that, in 
the great resolution of events, each shall learn something 
from the other; that to liberty we shall join greater efficiency, 



254 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

and that to efficiency Germany will add far greater liberty 
than her people have enjoyed under Prussian domination. 
Possibly, in view of Russia and Austro-Hungary, Turkey, 
and some of the less civilized peoples of the earth, the con- 
clusion may be forced upon men that there is no essential 
recipe for industrial and social efficiency and supremacy to 
be found in despotism, even that of the Hohenzollerns. Possi- 
bly from this conflict there may emerge a suspicion that the 
virtues claimed for that house and its adherents may be 
found among the German people themselves rather than in 
its autocracy. And it may well be that, whatever the fate of 
the contending elements, men may difi^erentiate between the 
accidental and the fundamental elements of greatness; that, 
like France, we may become military but not obsessed with 
dreams of conquest; like England, we may sacrifice the 
lesser for the greater good; like the United States, we shall 
still endeavor to maintain "justice, tranquillity, welfare, and 
liberty"; and "make democracy safe." And if that be 
idealism, let us all make the most of it. 

Finally, so far as we in the United States are particularly 
concerned, this means more than mere generalities. The 
establishment, even the safety, of a democratic form of gov- 
ernment is not enough. If It Is to survive, it must prove 
itself superior; for it is only too evident that if the Cossack 
can prove the better and more efficient of the two, he will at 
least share honors with the Republican. And in this connec- 
tion there may be adduced two illustrations of the problems 
which confront any society that, like our own, stands for 
equality as well as liberty. The first is the question of nat- 
uralization. If there has been one problem which, apart 
from the actual conflict of arms, has caused the champions of 
liberty in this present war an incalculable amount of trouble, 
it is the laxness of their methods In permitting the unregu- 
lated residence of unnaturalized aliens among them. If there 
is one source of danger to this country which has thus far sur- 
passed all others since this conflict began, it is the presence of 
uncounted masses who have taken advantage of our liberty 
of opportunity but have proved careless, or unwilling, or even 
resentful, in the matter of obligation towards the nation 
which provides them a living. Their presence and the toler- 
ance with which they have been treated, have been due to 



AMERICA 255 

economic causes, the insistent demand of employers for 
labor. But it is apparent that states cannot Hve by economics 
alone, and that, if we are to survive as a nation, we must 
compel some recognition of the rights of government — 
possibly naturalization after a term of years — as well as the 
rights of employers in the introduction and the status of 
aliens. 

The second is the age-long problem of the exploiter; the 
man who sees in every circumstance of life, even in national 
danger, only the opportunity to better his own fortunes. In 
this we are not alone. No people, no form of government, has 
ever been free from this ineradicable enemy of society. The 
qualities which produce him lie deep in human nature. 
He is impervious to the plea of obligation, he is almost be- 
yond the power of the state to control. Even in Germany he 
has been the subject of violent attack. But if the cause cannot 
be reached by legislation, if it can be only mitigated by 
education, its results can at least be minimized. It gives one 
heart and new belief in human nature and democracy to see 
how many of the greater leaders of industry have put their 
services, and their machinery of production, at the disposal 
of the government. But it is more than questionable whether 
the volunteer system is any more desirable in the industrial 
field that it is in military affairs, or would be, let us say, in 
taxation. For there, especially, we have not merely slackers; 
we have men who, not content with their own immunity, 
propose to turn the nation's necessity, even the generous Im- 
pulses of their fellows, into capital. 

That problem, like the question of unnaturalized aliens, 
has been faced, and largely settled, by the warring nations 
of Europe, on the same principle as military service — equality 
of obligation. The people have learned the lesson of des- 
potism. "The state!" Louis the Fourteenth Is reported to 
have said, "I am the state"; and, whatever the truth of that 
old saying, the sacrifice of the individual to the state as ex- 
pressed in the wishes of its rulers has been the dominant 
note of the autocracies. "The state!" the democracies may 
now well retort, "We are the state." And to the general 
good the individual interest must be sacrificed. 

So far have we come in our thinking, and largely in our 
practice, as the result of the great conflict. But thought and 



2S6 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

practice alike may be pushed too far. From such a position 
there Is a danger that, when the conflict is over, one of 
two results may follow. The one is the continuance of the 
spirit thus aroused into a despotism of democracy, which is 
scarcely less dangerous than the despotism of a ruling house. 
The other is a powerful reaction against the whole system 
engendered by the war, and a revulsion towards a still more 
lax democracy. Either is to be deplored; and it will be the 
task of statesmanship to find that middle way between these 
two extremes in which, as in all human affairs, there lies the 
only safety. But of this we may be sure. Whatever the out- 
come, Cossack, or Republican, or neither, the world will 
never be the same again, in thought or practice, government 
or society. It is our task to see that, In so far as possible, we 
shall make it something better. 



(e) ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION 

WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE: WHAT THE WAR DID FOR 
BREWER (January, 1919) 

Three of us at the table. Around the table is built the hotel 
of a town of ten thousand. At other tables are business men, 
farmers, professional men, clerks, an occasional mechanic, 
or carpenter, or workman, eating noonday lunch. In the 
town of ten thousand people around the hotel are five blocks 
of stores and offices, a state educational institution, a de- 
nominational college, two or three wholesale jobbing es- 
tablishments, an ice plant, an iron foundry, a country club, 
a railroad division, a dozen prosperous garages, a Y. M. C. A. 
building, half a million Invested in common school buildings 
and equipment, municipal water works, a municipal light 
plant operated under a lease, five banks with a deposit of 
something over two million. And around the city is a county 
with a population of twenty-five thousand. 

That is the background. On one side of the table sat Albert 
H. Gufler, manager and largely owner of the local branch 
of the largest wholesale grocery house in Central Kansas. 
Beside him sat Harry Lakin of the Newman Dry Goods Com- 
pany. Said Gufler: 



AMERICA 257 

"What do you think — you know that Brewer that used 
to drive a team for me; pretty good sort of fellow, steady, 
hardworking, industrious, capable — well, he quit me not 
long ago and went down to the railroad to work in the round- 
house. And say — he came up to my packing room the other 
day with a check for forty-eight dollars, get me? Forty- 
eight dollars for one week's work. Of course he put in Sun- 
days and some overtime, but that forty-eight dollars almost 
paralyzed my packing room. I don't know whether I will 
have a man back on the job to-morrow morning. Forty- 
eight dollars for one week's work! We have boosted wages 
down there and added a war bonus and done everything 
they have asked for, but forty-eight dollars for an ordinary 
man's work for one week In a cinder pit — say, I don't know 
what we are going to do." 

Thirty-one years ago Gufler began working for the Poehler 
Mercantile Company at Lawrence for three dollars a week, 
and has worked up. Harry Lakin began as bundle boy In the 
Newman Company about that time and he has worked up. 

No one said anything at first and we jabbed our pumpkin 
pies in silence, then Harry Lakin spoke: 

"Say Al, I expect we will all have to get used to that 
forty-eight dollars a week. You know it is really just a habit, 
this thinking that forty-eight dollars is too much for a man 
working in the roundhouse for a week's work down in the 
grime and fumes of the cinder pit, and not enough for the 
fellow working in the superintendent's office. Maybe the 
forty-eight dollars is just as fair a wage for the fellow who 
works days and nights and Sundays down in the roundhouse 
burning out his lungs in the cinder pit, as it is for a fellow up 
in the company's offices sweating and fuming and fretting 
about getting tonnage for the company or trains out of a jam 
or buying ties and betterments for the Howard Branch. It 
is just a habit that we had of thinking that>»a dollar and a half 
or three dollars a day was enough for the first assistant night 
wiper Brewer, and not enough for the chief clerk to the traffic 
manager. And as I was a saying, we have all got to get used 
to it because they are not going back. You can call it Bolshe- 
viki, or revolution, or socialism, or whatever you please, but 
these wages that labor is getting are going to remain about 
as they are." 



258 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

"Well," answered Gufler, *'If we boost wages In the pack- 
ing room, we will have to boost prices, and the folks will have 
to pay more for their chow." 

"Well, let's do it. When I was up in Yukon," answered 
Lakin, "I found out one thing good and hard; that a cheap 
camp made a cheap man, and after this war there's not going 
to be any more cheap camps in this world. A fellow — an extra 
brakeman on the Superior Branch — came in the store the 
other day, and we tried to sell him a six dollar hat, and he 
wouldn't have it. He wanted a twelve dollar hat, as good a 
hat as there was in the house, and he got it. Moreover, that 
fellow and the man named Brewer are living in thirty dollar 
houses with hot and cold water, electric lights and gas range, 
kitchen gardens in the back yards, lilacs and blue grass in the 
front yards, and little pergolas out at the side. These are 
two of the million bungalows, pretty little seven-room civil- 
ized houses, that labor has moved into since the war, all 
over America, in cities and towns and villages. There the 
boys are in those bungalows, and the children are wearing 
good clothes, and eating meat once or twice a day, and 
going to school regularly, and you can't blast them out 
of these bungalows and take that meat away from them, 
and drag their children out of school, without a revolu- 
tion; and there are more of them and they will win the 
revolution." 

"That's all right," returned the wholesaler. "But, Harry, 
what do you think of paying the engineer on the railroad 
two hundred and fifty dollars a month and then paying the 
train dispatcher who directs the engineer only one hundred 
and twenty-five dollars a month .^ Aren't brains more Im- 
portant than brawn .f"' 

"Well, let's see about that. Maybe that is habit again. 
Your engineer out in all kinds of weather, risking his life 
every minute, working like a horse when he is on duty on an 
average in these days ten hours a day, may be serving society 
better on the whole than the dispatcher sitting in a comfort- 
able office, sure of a whole hide. Both jobs, the engineer's 
and the dispatcher's, are more or less standardized. Both re- 
quire what you call brains: the engineer's brains are in his 
trained hands, the dispatcher's are in his head. But society 
may decide to re-value and re-mark her goods after this war; 



AMERICA 259 

and maybe the price of the different kinds of brains that men 
use may be reconsidered." 

In any case, the economic readjustments made necessary 
in the crises of this war have done one thing. They have 
given us freedom of speech about economic conditions, so 
that one may suggest that society is paying her superinten- 
dents too much without having to answer to the charge 
that one is an anarchist for presuming to question the 
order that is. That much the war has done that no treaty can 
undo. 

And to return to our luncheon table, we may safely say 
that, after all, the war aims of the Allies, whatever of high 
sounding phrases they may contain, stripped of their diplo- 
matic language, cover considerably this man named Brewer, 
who left the packing room of the wholesale house and went 
down to the roundhouse and drew forty-eight dollars for a 
week's work in the cinder pit. His name is Legion rather than 
Brewer, and he Is coming out of the laboring class — a class 
that has had irregular, underpaid work, and is emerging 
into the middle class, a class that lives without the great 
black devil of fear that continuously was prodding the coat- 
tails of poverty before the war. Instead of fear, his life Is 
full of hope. Is motived by hope; hope of better things for his 
children; hope of a college education for his boys; hope that 
his girls may move into a little better bungalow than his own 
when they marry. 

For after all, making the world safe for democracy is a 
grand phrase, but democracy also means equality of oppor- 
tunity as well as political rights. Indeed, political rights are 
only desired for the power they will give to the man who 
desires larger economic freedom. For the larger economic 
freedom of the common man who does the common work in 
this common world, all of our ships laden to the guards with 
guns and powder and soldiers and sailors have been plowing 
the sea. For "the more abundant life," all our young men 
have been marching to the front and dying, or coming back 
with the new vision of consecrated self-sacrifice; all our great 
industries have been speeding up to the urgent need of 
the crisis. For the millions who until this new day have been 
more or less hidden beneath the mudsills of our white- 
painted, green-blinded, two-storied social edifice, all this 



26o WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

pomp and circumstance of glorious war spread its gay and 
tragic pageant over the earth. 

And the issue is becoming more and more clearly defined 
every hour. Even with the gold lace and red broadcloth of 
royalty in England, and for all the fuss and feathers of no- 
bility in Italy, those countries and the two great republics, 
France and America, are essentially the homes of free men — 
men who at least know what freedom means, political, eco- 
nomic, and social — even if they enjoy only a portion of their 
ideals. And similarly, in spite of the fine talk of the German 
socialists, for all the subtle theories of the German scientists 
about the survival of the brutalists, for all the state paternal- 
ism of Prussia — a kind of hog-fattening political economy to 
make fine sausages for the aristocracy — the world can see 
that Germany was not the home of the free men, nor the 
abode of men who knew what freedom is and aspire to free- 
dom sanely. If Germany had won, we should have had pa- 
ternalism, the strong aristocratic control of economic con- 
ditions that keeps the average man on the lower economic 
levels; doling out to him just enough of the life which his 
labor creates to keep him contented. Now that the Allies 
have won, we should have fraternalism. And fraternalism 
offers to the average common man all the distinction and 
preference and gain that his talents entitle him to. Paternal- 
ism ofi^ers rations. Fraternalism may not even give a man 
rations, but it offers him a struggle for justice. Fraternalism 
seeks no common levelling process. Fraternalism seeks no 
economic balance which will keep the slave fat and con- 
tented. Fraternalism seeks not to hamstring the stronger 
man and make him a weakling, but would give every man 
all he earns and make him earn all he gets. 

This is of course an ideal condition. Human justice is un- 
attainable because human nature is not perfect. But the 
ideal, the thing towards which the common aspirations of the 
common people turn, is after all the thing which makes a 
civilization good or bad. And so long as there existed in the 
earth a civilization founded upon the ideals of crass material- 
ism, bolstered by a hereditary caste composed of privilege 
holders — profit-grabbing, self-centred men with autocratic 
power — so long every democratic ideal in the world was 
threatened. 



AMERICA 261 

This is because we are in an era where the common man 
has more intelligence than he ever had before. He knows 
what he wants and he knows how to get what he wants; for 
he has in his hands the weapons of democratic government 
in America, in England, in Italy, in France, and when an- 
other generation arises, with popular education, Russia too 
will be equipped with the weapons of democracy. After our 
victory for democracy on the battle line, complete, unques- 
tioned, and obvious to the German, nothing that boundaries, 
or treaties, or spheres of influences will do, can change the 
current of the times. The decisive end of this war will bring 
in a new epoch, and it will mean the rise of that portion of 
the population, all over civilization, in Germany as well as 
among the Allies, which, during the last and passing epoch, 
has been discontented because of the manifold injustices that 
have bound it. We shall see a sane attempt to abolish grind- 
ing class poverty in the world. 

And that does not mean of course that we shall have social- 
ism. That does not mean that everybody shall get his bread 
ticket from the city hall; that the world shall be levelled 
downward; that the talent of men will not count in the world; 
that the strong man will not rise faster and go further than 
the weak! It does not mean that the fool and the wise man 
will share and share alike in this world's goods. It does not 
mean that Marxian socialism or anything like Marxian so- 
cialism will be the order of the new day. Two things have 
been everlastingly blown up by the big shells bursting on 
the battle front: one is Marxian socialism and the other is 
unrestrained capitalism. But if an armistice had been of- 
fered by the Allies which permitted a softening of the blow 
of destruction to the German citadel of privilege, the war 
would have ended in a truce and not a peace, for this fight 
had to go clear through to a victory. If Germany had won, 
privilege would have held its gains all over the earth. And 
its gains would be registered in the injustices of our economic 
life which produce poverty as a class condition. 

It is easy enough to retort that the conclusion that a 
German victory would have been a world-wide victory for 
privilege, is mere assertion. Yet there must be some vital 
philosophical difference between the contention of the Allies 
and the contention of Germany. For four years and more 



262 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

Germany has waged one kind of war and the Allies in the 
main have waged another kind of war. In waging her war, 
Germany gradually had accumulated the scorn and hatred 
of the world. And during the same time the Allies had 
gathered to themselves one nation after another in sym- 
pathetic co-operation. Now there must be some reason for 
this violent antipathy of the civilized world to Germany 
and her cause. No one can say truly that this antipathy was 
founded chiefly upon fear of mere geographical aggression 
by Germany. It was not a matter of boundaries entirely, 
it was not entirely a matter of blame or credit in starting 
the war. Civilization revolted from Germany chiefly because 
the Germans every day in their conduct of the war, in their 
propaganda of their cause, revealed their faith in a material 
world. Germany showed herself a crass materialist. 

Civilization to-day outside of Germany is founded more 
or less upon an aspiration towards justice. Of course, the 
justice is approximate — sadly behind the aspiration. But the 
aspiration is dominant. Germany, however, placed small 
reliance on justice. Germany believed in force, she could 
understand only force, she spoke only with force. Now the 
civilization in the earth which we call Christian is based upon 
a deep and abiding faith that this is not a material world; 
a faith that there are forces in the world stronger than steel, 
more powerful than dynamite, more resolute than blood and 
iron; forces that control the destinies of men and nations; 
forces outside ourselves which make for righteousness — 
forces that slowly but surely are establishing justice in the 
earth. Consciously, more or less, we forget these forces, but 
subconsciously in the heart of Christian civilization these 
forces are recognized and some way we all believe that 
"underneath are everlasting arms." 

Now these forces outside ourselves that make for righteous- 
ness, that are establishing every decade a widening realm of 
justice in the relations of men, are the Indefinable, Inscru- 
table forces that make for human progress. Whatever prog- 
ress has been made during the ages has been made by the 
slow and Inexorable rise in our human relations of the spirit 
of mutual help among men. That spirit has come to men 
through their desire to ameliorate the hard lives of their 
fellows, and essentially it is the practical application in hu- 



AMERICA 263 

man Institutions of the golden rule. Hence the rise of de- 
mocracy and the rise of Christianity have come along the 
centuries at about the same pace. 

Indeed, democracy is not a form of government. Democ- 
racy is a philosophy of life, an attitude of the common mind 
of men towards the weak and the oppressed, an aspiration 
of humanity towards justice. Democracy is Christianity 
institutionalized. Germany held to the philosophy of Baby- 
lon, the philosophy of force, the philosophy of unrighteous 
materialism. Germany was a throw-back to the pagan order; 
Nebuchadnezzar, Nero, and Nietzsche, all great exponents 
of the devilish philosophy that there is no God In Israel, 
no progress save that made in steel and stone and wood and 
gold and Iron. So we found Germany in this war functioning 
after the manner of a pagan civilization in a modern world; 
and thus she slowly but steadily alienated the Christian 
peoples of the earth. Germany expounded the monstrous 
philosophy of get and grab. And it is that philosophy which 
lined up the world against her. That is the philosophy of 
privilege, that is the philosophy of the man who holds what 
he does not earn against the man who earns what he does 
not hold. Its voice is the bull roar of the Hon of force. 

And those who hope for sane social progress, those who 
hope for a redistribution of the benefits of the civilization 
for which we are all struggling In the thousand, thousand 
paths of life that run through our complicated economic 
order, will make no compromise in our peace terms with the 
mammon of unrighteousness. The German philosophy, the 
philosophy of master and slave, that Is in the end the philos- 
ophy of force, must be dethroned. The world cannot live half 
slave and half free. 

All of which brings us back to the rural county of twenty- 
five thousand, and the town of ten thousand, with Its two 
million bank deposits, its railroad divisions, its seventy-five 
thousand dollar Y. M. C. A. building, its state and denom- 
inational colleges. Its half million Invested in public schools, 
its five business blocks, its hotel where the farmers, mer- 
chants, doctors, lawyers mechanics, clerks, and bankers are 
sitting at lunch, and Harry Lakin of the Newman Dry 
Goods Company, still eating his pumpkin pie, is saying to 
Gufler of the wholesale grocery house: 



264 WAR AIMS AND PEACE IDEALS 

"I tell you, Al, It is like this; now that we have won this 
war, you and I have got to quit gasping and swallowing hard 
when we hear that this man named Brewer gets forty-eight 
dollars for a week's work of days, nights, and Sundays in the 
cinder pit. About all this war was for, Al, was to get us out 
of the habit of thinking that our old notions about who had 
the best of it coming to him are divinely inspired. They are 
not. In the shake-up you will not jar Brewer loose from his 
forty-eight dollars. You may jar the division superintendent, 
and the first assistant auditor, and the division freight agent 
loose from their forty-eight dollars, but Brewer and his 
forty-eight dollars, and his little old bungalow, and his son 
in college, and his daughter marrying the doctor, are here to 
stay. You know, Al, I have got a notion that this is what it 
means for the world to be safe for democracy." 



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